Foolishman - I fear that either you won't get many responses or you'll get a wide variety of disparate tips and thoughts that are difficult to put to use without a better grounding in how the game works. It is very difficult to give any coherent and useful tips to such a broad question.
I would suggest investing some time reading the threads here and in the strategy forum, and, more importantly, playing the game. Play the game in tutorial mode - and play it again if you don't do well. Then play at Chieftan level until you get a good enough grasp on the game and its concepts to make sense of the threads in these forums.
At some point in your combined efforts of gameplay and forum study, I suspect you'll hit an "Aha!" moment and then progress rapidly forward in following the discussions here and how they relate to your game. (but don't confuse "progress" with playing at higher difficulty levels and/or becoming bored with lower levels - on another forum site there is a fairly active thread that asks "What level have you won on" -- I found it very interetsing to see the number of posters who have responded "Level X, but I have more fun playing at Level X-1 or X-2.")
Catt
