- Siege mastery trait is a great one to pick.

- Get Dwarven Miners asap. 2 miners per 3 nodes. So if you have 2 gold and 2 stone quarries, that would be 8 miners. They increase your mining by quite a bit.

- Level up your units! For me, my melee units I always max resistances first, then a ration of 2:1 in damage and health. As far as ranged goes, I get a ration of 2:1 for damage and range, with a handful of points in ammo (I go up to 8 or 900). Some melee units i use as a shock force and focus on damage and hp, but those guys I send in after everyone else, and pull them out as soon as they start getting focused.

- You can build resource camps. Create an army of villagers and give them 100 gold (even 1, since you can always add to it later) and set them just outside of your city. Create a basic camp for 80g. I usually go 50 on gold, and 10 on food. 3-4 of these camps is ideal (you can buy additional army slots for 25-30 crowns and can have up to 10 armies total). Great gold income for leveling your units to 20, as well as getting crowns. You pick. I usually level up first, then get the crowns.

- I start out with 1 army of 30/60 units. I use those for my main questing/getting started army and level them up to 20 first. On the back burner, I work on another 30/60 unit to get them to 20, so that way when they are all max, I can combine them and start sieging cities safely.

- Mules. I Highly recommend a mule army to transport resources after battles/from resource camps/take to the trader. elves/treants, humans/wagons, orcs/ogres (farm the ogres since they are expensive to purchase).

- Choose your battles. In pvp, as well as pve. Don't jsut charge them all in at once. Send in the tanks first. Archers, then other melee damage.

- Micromanage! Keep on eye on unit health. Pull any out when they are low on hp and get them away from the fight so you dont lose them. It costs a lot to replace level 20 knights for instance, when you can just pull them out and heal them with a shaman/hero/trader.

- Spike traps are deadly. Run over them with rams, or your tanks since most of them can heal.

- Take out the oil pots above the gatehouses before going in, or you will feel the hurt!