All of the topics I have written about below are my personal opinions on game mechanics and detailed descriptions of how I typically play.

My individual player tactics have been modified and tweaked to stay current with the modern version of the game and hopefully they can help others who may be interested. I believe these methods are most useful to players who are light or moderate coiners that log in somewhat frequently or on a daily basis.

City Management (Construction & Agreements)

Aside from the top tier construction levels on a few of the buildings in my main city I have basically completed what I wanted to here. 

Resource production and warehouse capacity is fairly high. Not maxed by any means, but I do not have to raid for resources to keep progressing in every other aspect available to me. 

I invested the most in terms of construction into my acropolis to ensure my troops builds stay safe, and the building levels for resources trading were stopped at the very beginning of lvl. 20+.

In terms of developing the Elysian city, I have personally taken a casual approach to it. I upgraded one artisan to master and I am considering upgrading another. Hopefully they will offer a cost reduction for the upgrade in the future. The actual day to day construction there is mostly focused on moonstone production and warehousing.

My agreement signing is mostly split between getting the highest levels for the troop types that I use the most often or maintain in large numbers, and researching traps to the maximum potential.

I cannot say enough in regards to how important I believe it is to have a good setup of traps in your city. Traps are easily one of the most powerful aspects of the game now and I would recommend focusing on researching those agreements over anything else. They are incredibly effective in battle while at the same time being completely expendable and cheap to rebuild after an attack.

Resource Production / Phylarch

As I mentioned above my resource production is high enough to keep my city sustainable and build up a surplus for whatever else I might need. 

I set up the resource production guardian to give a boost to timber and bronze since they are the most valuable, and I keep the Phylarch configured to boost all resources production with the rest going to troop build speed. The mythical skill slot is always set to instant offensive units, but if I am going to be doing some heavy pvp or pp I will switch it to offensive or defensive boost.

(Side note) I would advise players to not use mythical skills until the skill they want to use is maxed out. The Marks you need to activate them are slow to obtain, therefore it would be wasteful to spend them prematurely.

Raiding 

It is a very rare occasion that I raid specifically for resources anymore, but for others this is a crucial element of their game play.

Typically, I only raid when there is a global event offering additional raids, or if I need a large chunk of resources to research a new agreement level and I don't want to just buy what I need from the market.

What is critical to consider when resource raiding is that you want to keep it as close to 100% profitable as you possibly can. Especially now that traps have been introduced, thus making even otherwise undefended cities a potential mauling for your raiding party. 

If you raid an active city with even moderately developed traps the losses you will take will almost always leave you with a net loss when everything is calculated in the end. (The points you earn from destroying traps in pvp tournaments are also really bad when compared to the amount of points you can earn with the same amount of troops in a battle with another army.)

Some players carefully scout everything they raid for basically two reasons. The first being they want to establish if the city even has enough resources to bother sending out a raid in the first place. The second is to see if the city is defended by the player that owns it, or if another player has placed their own defensive troops there as reinforcements.This is a common tactic among more savvy players looking to kill another players raiding party with them not anticipating any resistance, since it is typically done in cities that seem to be inactive. 

Personally, I don't feel that the extra work that comes with scouting is worth the effort, but many others would disagree. 

When I do go out raiding for resources I just do a basic sweep of the map and look for inactive cities in the 50+ level range. No coa and no dominion status are good indicators to stop and take a closer look at a potential raiding target. Then I will look for destroyed towers / resource statue and in most cases a low intellect level to firmly establish that the city is inactive. This "no scouting" method seems to work about 90-95% of the time and I think the extra effort it saves me in the long run makes up for any potential pvp surprises.

The next thing I look for is a well developed set of resource production buildings and even more importantly a well developed set of warehouses and granaries. It is also nice to see a lower level acropolis, but even if it is a lvl 20+ you can still get a good yield from a raid. Examining all of this before you raid is easily more important than what level the city is or what sort of expensive decorations were built before it was abandoned. Just because some aspects of the city were expensive to build will not make it a worthwhile raiding target if the inventories are simply unavailable. 

With that being said I believe that raiding active cities specifically for resources has become far too risky in this modern version of the game. Not only will even a small amount of troop looses destroy any profit potential, there is also the fact that an active player is probably using up most of their available resources every time they log in so it's unlikely you will find much worth taking anyway.

Tournaments 

I do enjoy playing tournaments and most of the time I try to frame my activity in the game around what types of tournaments are currently being offered. The potential for rewards is especially attractive when the rewards for multiple tournaments can be combined with whatever activity you are engaged in.

For example: a solo and coal version of the same tournament is running at the same time, or the combination of pvp and emporia occupation, persian position tournament & exp exhibition, ect... However, these combinations may not always be running on the same timer. Therefore, it may be prudent to wait until a portion of the time limit on a new tournament has passed before working on it since there is the possibility that another relevant one may start before it is over.

PVP

With that being said I have to say that pvp tournaments are my favorite. The good ones tend to offer the best rewards in relation to the amount of troops that wind up being sacrificed, and the potential for advantage over whatever you are fighting is the highest.

My individual strategy for pvp tournaments is very simple and I think overall it gives the best potential for rewards. 

The ideal situation for me is to attack other players that have defenses stationed in the emporia. I never scout and sometimes I will even boost to make my attack faster, since the combat there can be very competitive. The element of surprise and speed are critical to your success when fighting in the emporia. 

The composition of my attacking forces is almost exclusively swordsmen and myrmidons numbered at around 10,000 and 1,000 each. I choose this combination because they are the cheapest and quickest units to produce along with being the most effective type of troops to use when attacking some of the strongest defensive units in the game. 

These cheap light / heavy infantry can also have their agreements maxed out inexpensively, and the set of general's equipment that effects them both is easy to obtain and upgrade to the highest level. Add a well-developed saboteur guardian and maybe a +10 / 20% offensive boost and you have a very potent fighting force for very little expense. 

This is an excellent tactic for new to intermediate level players, or even an advanced player who wants to earn good rewards with troops that are completely expendable. I never use champion units when I do this and I will only occasionally use phalanx units if my first attack fails and I see that I will have an advantage for a second attack from the initial battle report. Usually the first attack gives me more than enough points to get the rewards I want making it a rare occasion that I have to escalate beyond the initial engagement. 

On top of all of that there are even more advantages when you are fighting offensively in the emporia!

Obviously the main advantage is that the defending troops are outside of the player's city. Therefore removing any benefits that come from towers, traps, and the cities defense bonus. They also loose the advantage of having a % of their troops being set aside in the infirmary to be revived for free. This doesn't really affect the outcome that the offensive player will have, but it certainly isn't beneficial to the player who is defending. 

I have also noticed that after these types of battles occur the report will often show there was a very weak defensive guardian being used and in many cases no guardian at all. Sometimes I will also go visit the city of the player I just fought and see what type of general equipment was being used and find it to be configured incorrectly. Even worse I will see that they didn't bother to turn on dominion status for an hour or so yet they had placed thousands of defensive troops in the most dangerous situation imaginable.

All of these little factors can add up massively in your favor when you are trying to earn tournament points that simply cannot be replicated with Persian positions. Yes you can send a small attack to a PP to figure out the troop configuration, but the overall strength of those individual troops will always be the same. Then you have to consider the fact that in some cases you will need to use more expensive units to be the most effective in beating certain positions and will loose the advantage of only using expendable troops.

Now putting all of these factors aside. I have to say that there is nothing more satisfying than killing champs and other expensive defensive units with troops that I can easily replace in a few days with almost no effort.

Raiding cities for pvp however is a completely different situation. As I mentioned before, the introduction of traps has made attacking active cities incredibly costly compared to the times before they were available. I only attack cities in pvp tournaments literally out of desperation. This happens rarely and it is usually because I only need a few more points to reach the rewards tier that I want and there are no other options available.

I am not trying to say that it is impossible to get good tournament points from attacking a defended city, but if traps and towers are the only thing you are going to be dealing with then I wouldn't even bother. You will get almost no points for destroying them and the player you attack will get plenty of points from the units you are guaranteed to loose. 

Now it is possible to degrade or completely eliminate the traps in a city by first attacking it with assassins, but the expense involved with that makes it foolish to use such a tactic on a random city if you are only attacking it for tournament points. Whatever rewards you could have possibly gained could have simply been purchased directly from the market and at a much lower cost than the assassins you will end up wasting. 

If you absolutely must attack a city and you are in a tournament situation there are only a few recommendations I can give you. First I would reduce your attacking army to only one unit classification, light infantry for example. This will eliminate 3 out of the 5 types of traps you will be forced to deal with once the battle takes place. The second bit of advice I would give is to simply attack a player that you already don't like or are at war with. Then the attack will at least have some meaning even if you are not at an advantage.

On a positive note I will say that occasionally someone in my coalition will find a city that has a lot of defense out and give the coordinates away since they do not need to commit to destroying it all for good tournament rewards. Typically the traps and tower will have already been destroyed and you will be guaranteed combat with nothing but defensive troops. Occasionally someone will have scouted it too and you will know exactly what it there before you even make an attack.

With all of that being said I can honestly say that if I am not attacking someone in the emporia for a pvp tournament, then the second best situation I want to be in would want to be in is the role of city defender. In some ways I almost prefer to be attacked in my own city to get pvp points since I can get the benefits of everything it offers. The problem with this is finding someone who will legitimately attack me, and even with provocation it is difficult to find anyone that is interested.

Persians

Persian position tournaments can be just as rewarding as pvp tournaments, plus you get the added benefit in having all of your losses applied to the payout bank. Of course you are also opening yourself up to the possibility of getting a really good troop payout on top of everything else.

Personally I try not to play PP too aggressively when tournament conditions are very favorable. Mainly because I have heard too many stories from other players about good payouts rarely happening during these times. I have never experienced this myself, but the thought of getting a good portion of my army wiped out while looking for a payout that will not come is enough to make me tread lightly. Thankfully most of these guys I mentioned wind up getting what they are looking for a few days later.

Also on top of that I rarely play PP at the higher levels needed to get the points required for the best tournament rewards. Not to say that I have never taken myself to the upper most extremes when playing PP, but I don't do it habitually.

Once I get a reward amount and troop configuration that I am satisfied with I will stop playing them seriously for a long time. Only after a considerable amount troop building and collection of other tournament rewards will I make an attempt at another high level payout.

Otherwise I will just play through a few low level positions when tournaments are on to get some basic rewards and maybe complete a few quests related to PP as a bonus. It almost always translates to a loss in the end but I can further justify it because the junk General equipment you get is useful since I have not fully upgraded all of my best equipment. 

I know many players love to play high level Persians and they always rank high in tournaments but that style of game play just isn't for me. When I think about the good payouts that I have gotten I consider myself lucky and I am not willing to risk squandering them needlessly. 

I have read all of the theories and methods on how to play them and what calculations I should be doing to predict my next payout but I honestly have never really followed any particular formula. My strategy is actually pretty simple. I don't throw away champs into positions and I try not to use imperial and veteran units. Otherwise I will send everything else I have both offensive and defensive at the highest levels and hope for the best. It sounds reckless but I feel like my results have been fair. I try not to get greedy and I make sure I have increased the size of my army considerably before I play them seriously again to ensure I don't get wiped out before it pays me back.

Obviously after saying that it is clear that I am no expert but I will say this as advice to the casual player like myself or someone who is working their way up to my level. ( I am up to lvl 190.)

First of all do not get carried away with PP, be it with tournaments or just chasing that next big payout. 

The payouts get harder and harder to obtain every time you get one and it is very easy to get over your head. Also do not expect to get anything decent in rewards until you put in just as much if not more than the biggest payout you have gotten already.

I say that second part specifically because when you are playing tournaments you will loose a lot of troops to get the good rewards. Also if you try to go for big rewards on every tournament you will loose a lot of troops over several tournaments before you get that payout. Obviously as I said earlier the higher you have gone in the past the longer this process will take to complete, and by the end of it you could find yourself struggling to maintain enough of an army to do much of anything. 

Personally I prefer to have as much of my army alive and at my disposal as I possibly can while building up the resource value of my troops outside of the PP bank and payout system. 

However do not take all of this as a big argument against playing PP and how the system will cheat or destroy you. I have benefited greatly from playing them in terms of essentially converting weaker units and smaller amounts of expensive units(the value of the resources that went into making them) into large amounts of expensive units that I would never have been able to produce on my own in any reasonable amount of time. 

What I am saying is do not take anything for granted or make assumptions about what you are owed, and most of all play them with caution.

Also don't get caught up in what other players are doing or feeling like you need to put in a huge performance every time a PP tournament comes around. I firmly believe that pvp tournaments are much easier to get good rewards in when played correctly and even if you do not have much experience fighting other players then I suggest giving it a try. 

I know many players avoid pvp outside of necessity and believe it leads to problems and wider conflicts. Which in the days where everyone raided each others cities that certainly was the case. However I can honestly say that a vast majority of the battles I have engaged in at the emporia that were also legal in terms of my coalitions alliances and peace agreements have caused no animosity.

Just about everyone who goes there is expecting to fight and whatever happens there ends there.

Emporia / Pantheon / Capital

These types of tournaments revolve around either accomplishing some task a player can perform in regards to those places or pvp combat that takes place in the location itself.

The Emporia Occupation tournament is easily my favorite out of the three. It stacks perfectly with the regular pvp tournaments and the rewards are usually decent. 

I score essentially every point I get from this type of tournament from direct combat with other players at the emporia. You can also get points from collecting resources, but it's practically impossible to stay there for any reasonable length of time to do so because of the amount of attacks you will have to withstand. (Even a few small scale attacks will cause losses that will nullify any profit potential.)

A very large defensive force is required to hold an emporia for a long enough time span to gain a significant amount of points from collecting resources, but even that type of player will gain far more points from repelling attacks.

I have already talked extensively about offensive play in the emporia, and how I believe the defensive player is at a distinct disadvantage. Even with the new feature that allows multiple players from the same coalition to occupy a single emporia there is no comparison.

There are only two defensive tactics that I have seen that make any sense to me in this scenario. 

The first one is to send a smaller defense force with the only advantage being that the defender has calculated exactly what they are willing to loose for the prospect of a certain reward. They leave their troops at the location and don't have to do anything else but wait for an attacker to come along.

This is much easier compared to playing the role of the attacker. The downside of being on the offensive side of things is that you are constantly having to check for new people to arrive and hope you can attack them before someone else does. Sometimes it is simply a matter of being lucky and logging in just at the right time.

The Pantheon Takeover tournaments can be difficult at times. For me I will either try and find a level 1 pan that is owned by some coalition I am allowed to attack and hope they put defenses inside worth my effort. Occasionally I will occupy a level 1 pan by myself or with a few friends and see what happens. Of course you only place whatever defenses you are willing to loose and never more than you could win from the tournament itself.

The biggest scores I have gotten from this particular type of tournament is an outright act of war that just happen to occur at the same time. Either an enemy coalition attacks one of our pans or we attack one of theirs. Typically any rewards are not comparable to the losses if the attack was large enough to generate a significant amount of points for every member of the coalition defending the pan.

The Capital Showdown is certainly the worst of the three and probably the worst of any tournament currently offered.

I suppose you could generate some sort of reward by attacking a low level coalition capital or somehow staging something specifically for points. However if there was a serious attack on the capital of any major coalition by another major coalition the losses would be astronomical and the motivation for such an attack would have nothing to do with an in game tournament. 

Having said that the rewards they offer if such a thing does occur are not even remotely significant enough to matter to anyone involved.

Guardians

I only play guardians when the tournament is going on and I always go for max rewards. Beyond that I would advise anyone to try and get into the top 50 ranking so you can get some epic summoning bonds.

Playing this feature of the game is more of a grind than anything so if you have the time and the motivation to do it then give it your best effort.

The guardian exp boost is essential and a certain level of dominion status drastically increases the speed of the guardian's travel time, so make sure you have both of these activated.

Coalition Clash

Good concept and the rewards are great. My only complaint is that I think they are happening a little too often.

I try to put in a decent amount of points for my coalition when these are going on. 

Pvp and PP combat in my opinion are probably the worst ways of earning points in this situation. You can actually profit in terms of earning units by scoring all of your points doing non-combat activities.

The best ones in my opinion are playing guardians and boosting construction, agreement signing, and troop building to completion. Reviving troops works really well too but it can get a little expensive and I can guarantee that a 75% off revival will never be going on in the middle of one of these tournaments.

All of the other customized coalition tournaments. Capture the flag, Win the purple capital building, ect...

Not worth the effort in my opinion. 

They could possibly be reworked to offer something more interesting in terms of rewards which might motivate players to take them more seriously.

Everything else is easy. Just keep building...

WAR

This is endgame and the reason why I log in and play in the first place.

Any root cause or fundamental explanation as to why I do anything mentioned above is for the sole purpose of being ready for war.

I come from a coalition that believes in the power of diplomacy and avoiding conflict that is not warranted, and though we may walk softly be certain that we also carry a big stick.

Many of us know all too well that it is never wise to waste our greatest resources on petty squabbles or to playing games.

My Elite Cavalry will never be seen riding into battle unless it is to punish those that I can truly call my enemy. For that is their only purpose.

My Legions of Defense only serve to protect what is most important. The Capital of my coalition and the Pantheons we claim as our own.

When the time comes to fight our true enemies they will face nothing short of complete annihilation. 

A wrath that is unwavering and without hesitation.

My finest warriors wait patiently for this day. 

Forever growing stronger and always in preparation. 

And when the drums of war begin to play.

Damnation will be seen as a mercy.