Flori- You need a very focused strategy. First off, when you start a village, you really need a lot of time to babysit. Later on, you can leave it for half a day, a few days or whatever at a time, but in the begining you need to really focus on being the guiding hand.

If you read the pop up that occurs with the algae, you'll see that your villagers create the problem. You can delay the problem by monitoring the actions of your villagers. In the interim, it takes a fair amount of technology points to get all the things in place to resolve the problem. Therefore, you need to focus on technology and food for a very long time. Be very careful not to populate too much before you have a stable food supply. Keep your villagers working on food and technology at all times.

Hope this helps!

Tess