Building your city: order, priorities and defence

The fastest way to stall is to build a bit of everything. Each structure eats resources and queue time, and a city full of low-level buildings produces less than a city with a few well-upgraded ones.

Before building something new, ask whether upgrading what you already have would give you more today. Nine times out of ten it would.

• Base production at the highest level you can sustain.
• Storage capacity, so offline production isn't wasted.
• First military structures, once production can carry their upkeep.
• Support and specialisation structures, only with a stable economy.

Defending doesn't mean building the tallest wall possible. It means making an attack unprofitable compared to what the attacker gains.

A player with average defences and a nearly empty warehouse is attacked less than a player with strong defences and a full one. How attractive you are matters more than how solid you are.

Time with an empty queue is time you never get back. Before closing the game, always start the longest job you can afford.

While you're online, the opposite applies: short jobs let you react to events instead of being locked for hours.

• Expanding sideways instead of upgrading.
• Building military structures before you can maintain them.
• Leaving the queue empty overnight.
• Ignoring storage until you lose a full day of production.