You could check out Unity, Marmalade or Cocos2D-x perhaps. There's plenty written all over this site and the internet about their merits (I don't have much experience with any of them).

I'm not aware of any good general docs about making strategy games - you could try taking a look at positech's blogs perhaps seeing as you mentioned democracy. Main recommendation to a beginner is that you keep your first project's scope as small as you possibly can because no matter how simple you think your design is, you'll be shocked at the amount of effort and grind it'll take to finish it. And if you're thinking of trying to get a job in the industry, a not-very-good finished game is worth much more on the CV than an awesome unfinished one.

I'm about to release an iOS strategy game myself (link in sig), and would try to answer any specific questions, but can't think of much general advice. For a game like mine, I find having the AI play against each other a lot is good for finding bugs and getting balancing data. Actually, that reminded me of this article which you might like: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186088/postmortem_intelligence_engine_.php