@PositiveTower, welcome to the game!
Archetypes
As you have noticed, they give you a bonus in specific actions such as exploration, diplomacy, war, trade, setting new villages, etc.
Basics
To become sedentary, which isn’t obligatory but preferable, you have to research agriculture and/or animal husbandry.
Each village/city grants you one global action (maximum of 10 global actions), which doesn’t have a malus. Nevertheless, you can get more actions by granting jobs to your population. For instance, a farmer would have a bonus in farming actions. However, to grant jobs means you should research “Division of labor” first. If not for this ability, you would only get a malus with individual actions.
To understand how jobs rolls work, I will give a template.
Population: 30
Jobs: Farmer, Settler
Considering there is a population of 30, your tribe has 7 (it would’ve been 8 if you had 32 population) groups of 4 (take the ‘3’ from ‘30’ and add ‘1’). If you have 1 group of farmers (4 farmers) doing a farming action, it would have this roll:
x - 6 (6 groups aren’t used) + 1 (one group is used)/20
x - 5/20
Therefore, your initial rolls should be at least 16 to work, because your roll must be greater than 10/20 to work.
From village to civilization
At the beginning, you’re a village. To become a civilization, you must reach a population of 150 and have at least two villages either by conquest or by creating a new one (must have a population of 100 to create one).
Also, there’s a limit to the number of villages you can create. However, once one of your village reaches a population of 500, you can make it a city (free action) and there are no limits to the number of cities.