This post is primarily for the new player.

  1. The action(s) your Leaders take is and are the most important decisions you make each turn.  Their +25% bonus applies to most actions (not combat), and thus their presence can make or break almost any success.
  2. As-above, but, also, the most important action: Explore; is a Leader-only action (as is Diplomacy).  Thus, choosing where to send your leaders is always the highest-end of opportunity costs.
  3. Your starting location may not seem terribly important; but, it is.  You will not be able to achieve a perfect balance of terrain-types and access/distance to the larger CPs.  You must decide which of these is priority, and adjust accordingly.
  4. During the first month of the game - no action will outright fail.  Instead, any that would fail will only 'partially succeed' (Partial Success result).  This means you can take some risks in the early game by sending Units in different directions.  This does not apply to combat; if you send a single Unit against a giant; you're still going to die.  However, this does provide a brief safety net as you establish yourself.
  5. By the end of the first month, you will want to decide where to focus your efforts: do you become a jack-of-all-trades?  Or do you specialize in one area of the game?  How much do you want to specialize?  Begin to consider it early.
  6. Expect everything you do to somehow cost Gold.  Not everything does (like harvesting resources from a node), but you should expect nearly everything to have a cost.  In actions, in gold, in something.  This applies heavily to the 'Explore' action.