I've got a little more than 2500 people in my city, and it's doing very very well.  I've amassed over 50,000 denarii, mostly from exporting excess oil, furniture, and pottery, as well as weapons.  Nearly all of the housing is at the medium insulae level or above.  There's four granaries, 2 for wheat, and two for fruit, and plenty of warehouses near markets set to "get" the goods I need to supply each neighborhood.

It might seem like I'm overproducing fruit and wheat.  You're right, I am.  However, I'm paranoid.  Instead of making sure that I'm producing enough to feed everyone, I'm instead making sure I'm producing enough to keep my granaries full.  This is an important distinction to make.  Since your granaries are your "pulsepoints" of your city, I feel it's best to keep them stuffed at all times.  Even though you may build your city very slowly, something--such as housing evolution--might cause an unexpected run on food stores.  If your granaries are completely full most of the time, they're very hard to empty out.  A granary that's only half full, though, won't survive two "full" (ie, market lady plus >8 granary boys) market buying runs.

As you can see, I've started to create a "surburban" area far away from the main city.  I plan to make this my patrician housing area.  I've built it very slowly, starting at first with just the large temple to Mercury and one "for sale" sign.  See below for why I built the large temple.  As to why I'm building this area house by house, it's mainly to retard people from settling there, when I need them in my main city.  I'm not sure how the settlers pick where they want to live, exactly, but it seems to be based on desirability, though labor seems to have something to do with it.

My fruit farms were an interesting challenge; I wonder if it will be similar for veggies and/or meat, when it comes time to produce those items.  I was having a problem filling the first granary, the one by the farms themselves.  The market buyers were picking fruit up as fast as my farms could put fruit in the granary, which meant a lot of short, unnecessary runs, and choking off supplies of other needed goods in the neighborhoods.  So, I blocked off the main road with a statue, cutting off the markets from the farms.  Darned if the market ladies didn't use the gardens on each side of the statue as a shortcut!!  Well, anyways, once I blocked the road, I was able to fill the granary with fruit.  Then I built a second granary on the other side of town, set it to "get" fruit and nothing else, and then restored access.

Well, guess what?  The market ladies made a run on my full granary, and left it nearly empty.  I was back in the same boat as I was to begin with!  What to do?  Pray to Mercury, of course! :)  I built the large temple to him, and threw a large festival for good measure (and built a second oracle to make sure the other gods didn't get too honked off at me).  He quickly realized I needed some help, and filled my newest, empty granary with an assortment of foodstuffs!  The market buyers, realizing this granary was closer, and had many types of "second" types of food, made a run on that granary, and in so doing, gave me the time to fill the first fruit granary.  Since my "blessed" granary was set to "get" fruit only, the "mega-cart" pusher could merely replace the veggies and meat with a mega cart of fruit. Distribution problem solved! ;)

Look at the "inner city".  You might want to flatten the buildings with the crime display (he says proudly).  See how the two statues at the intersection block off two directions of travel?  This forces the majority of the foot traffic to travel in an "s" like pattern, ensuring maximum coverage, even if it does increase physical distance traveled a bit.

I'm currently exporting any pottery, furniture, and oil over 13.  I have six markets.  The export over (2*number of markets)+1 formula seems to be holding up well.  I'm rich. :)  And, no, I didn't give my whole salary to the city every year.  I started to feel guilty about doing that, so I stopped giving myself a salary at all at around 23,000 denarii.  I think. :P

Even wonder how your "overall" entertainment levels affect your city?  Well, I do...now.  See that block of housing that's all at the large insulae level?  Well, if my overall entertainment levels were just a bit higher, those houses would be grand insulae...and a couple of those grands would evolve into small villas.  Ooops.  I don't have enough spare housing for that to happen yet.  Soooo, until I figure out what to do, I'm letting the overall entertainment levels be less than perfect.  Now, when I saw a house that displayed the message "this house has some entertainment, but not enough" I thought the message meant that, for example, a house had access to an ampitheater, but not a regular theater.  Nope.  It can also mean that overall levels of entertainment are low.  If that's all that's holding you back between a housing evolution jump, and you're not ready for that jump, then you might be in for a little surprise.

Something else I noticed from my housing jump problem mentioned in the point above.  A 1x1 garden seems to exert more desirability than a small, or 1x1 statue.  You'll note that I've alternated statues and gardens around the fountain in the middle of my large insulae housing block.  It used to be all gardens, but that made more of my grand insulae, when under the influence of good overall entertainment coverage, turn into villas.  The majority of my population became rich freeloaders, and I couldn't sustain the labor loss.  By replacing half of those gardens with small statues, only two of the insulae will turn into villas, and that's okay, because I'm conciously trying to keep my overall entertainment levels down, but if I'm forced to increase them, it won't be so bad.  Boy, the subtleties of this game really make it interesting...I've never had to conciously keep housing levels lower-class! :)

That's about all I can think of to add at this point.  While the city's not as efficient as it was in its first incarnation, it's still pretty darned good.  The additional level of challenges added by increasing demands of our population makes for a slowly ramped-up difficulty that's challenging, yet emininently fun.  That's why I love this game!

Okay, once again, enough of my talk.  Here's Valencia :)