Here are a few tips for smaller players, especially players who may get attacked by larger players.
1. For cities up to level 12, use a warehouse to protect most or all of your resources. You can easily protect up to around 6-8k of resources with warehouses alone. If someone attacks you and does not get any resources because of your warehouse level, it will tend to discourage them.
2. Keep your hideout at least 2 levels above your city level with as many defending spies, especially if you have resources in the city. Hideouts are relatively inexpensive and players will not be as likely to attack if they do not know what resources or military you may have in a city. The unknown is a greater deterrent than a known threat.
3. Don't bother to build a large military when there are players around you with larger armies than you could support. More powerful players that attack you will only destroy your military and still take your resources. Then you will lose the resources used to build your military and you will have higher military support costs. Keep a minimal military until you have a good enough economy to support an effective military. Spend any extra income on resources that can build your economy faster.
4. Build up your walls. This will force any attackers to send more artillery against your cities or take more infantry losses. Either way, the attack will be more expensive to them. They will tend to choose easier targets.
5. Keep some sulphur in each of your towns but no more than is protected from pillaging by your warehouses. Make sure each town has a shipyard of a high enough level to build your best ships. This is so you can destroy a blockade if you need to. I will discuss more about this later.
6. Always keep the maximum wine in each town that is still protected by your warehouse. For example a level 13 warehouse will protect 6340 of each resource. My level 13 town uses 78 wine per hour. This will last me 81 hours. Someone blocking my port would have to do that for 81 hours straight (more than 3 days continuously) before I run out of wine. Blocking a port that long to not allow anything through is difficult and expensive (More on the risks of blockading later).
7. Try to keep your trading ports reasonably high so if you are attacked or blockaded, you can get resources in or out before the attack or blockade gets to your town.
8. If someone blockades your harbor, don't worry about it too much. Don't let it rattle you. Ships are very expensive to maintain and they are paying double to block your harbor. It will cost them more than you. Blockading someone's port is very risky. They cannot see what ships you or your alliance is sending but you can see everything they are sending. If they do not send a large fleet, you could destroy the blockading force by sending ships from another of your towns or building your own ships in your shipyard. I like the idea of building the ships (the entire battle group designed to destroy the blockading ships in one or two rounds) right in the shipyard. This is because there would be no maintenance cost. The ships are not requiring maintenance until they are built and they will be immediately in battle. (I almost did this to an enemy blocking my port but he gave up before I had to use this tactic) This is the reason for keeping a good shipyard and a good supply of sulphur in your town. If they blockade with enough ships to prevent this, it will cost them a lot of gold.
9. If someone occupies your town, do not worry about it. The only thing it does is makes it more expensive for you to build military in that town. So don't build military there and ship resources out and in that you need. You can basically conduct normal business except for military. Their occupation will discourage others from pillaging you because they may not want to risk angering the occupying player. Basically, an occupying force is protecting you and they cannot pillage you until they remove the occupation.
10. Until you have enough income from your cities to build a reasonably strong military, focus your research on economy and science. This will help you build your economic base faster and develop science faster and at a lower cost.
11. Build a carpenter's workshop and architect's office in every town so you get the discounts they give you. In the long run this will pay off and allow you to grow much faster.
12. There is one little known trick that some players use to protect their military when they are under attack. You can send your military to protect another city for up to 8 hours at at a time. You click on another town and clock on the "Defend town!" button. An interesting thing that I would like to do is send it to an enemy town so they would need to attack themselves to destroy your army but that may be risky because they could see how long they would be there. However, you can withdraw them at any time.
A good general rule about building levels is to keep most buildings around the same level as your town center.
Another note about blockading. When someone blockades your port, you can see when the blockade will end. They can send overlapping blockades but that is hard to do. When I had my port blockaded, I calculated how long it would take to get wine shipped to the city and determine when to begin loading. I calculated load time plus ship time and knew exactly when I needed to begin loading to get a load through just after a blockade ended. I calculated it and got it there within seconds after the blockade ended. It takes some work to do this, but to ruin the efforts of someone trying to ruin your game is worth it. They will eventually give up.
