Consolidated advice (many sources and a week of playing intensely)
1. Gather a few buildings first off by playing through the quests and avoiding battle. Players who battle you are listed on the news page, so you can return to them later once you are built up.
2. Buy foot solders / pike men, get swords, and armor. Avoid the magical units if you can until you can afford robes because they are easily killed.
3. Level up your buildings. L1 to L2 doesn't take long, L2 to L3 for some takes several hours, and L3 to L4 takes many hours for several buildings. Plan to upgrade later in the evening so that your longer upgrades work 'over night' or during the work day.
4. I really zero in on the rainbow hair in the attack list ... Just a thought.
5. Put up defense towers / bunkers as you expand, and level these up along with your bldgs. 'move' a building to see what it covers (covered bldgs turn blue).
6. You can do a lot of attacking biped types at the crossroads, and they tend to drop armor.
7. When spending skill points, always get 'stamina', up to a point. It is disappointing to get almost though a batter in some "map" location and run out of stamina. Later, it takes a lot of energy/stamina to defeat the enemies.
8. Avoid gathering allies until you are somewhat built up, and then do it slowly. From what I've read, the algorithm used to match players takes this into consideration.
9. Patience. This game benefits the player to has enough discipline / control to check hourly / half hour and gather gold. This isn't a 'quick game', like many other apps.
10. You *can* rearrange buildings, so don't 'expand' until you need to. After about 5 expansions they start costing a few thousand.
11. NEVER spend diamonds, and be VERY careful about new building and upgrades. Right after you build/upgrade there is a 'upgrade now' option which costs. I spent my own 15 bucks buying diamonds and gold, and wish I hadn't, because I ended up accidentally burning maybe 3.00 real dollars by tapping to quickly. You are much better off saving initial diamonds for advanced units.