I did some experimenting with macroing, trying to make economically efficient build orders. The basic goal is to be able to make a continuous (and indefinite) stream of citizens/units with a resource surplus left over for teching.
In Tournament mode, the best build I've yet made is something like this:
(Starting in Prehistoric)
- Put first 12 citizens on foraging
- Next 3 citizens chop wood
- Make settlements to minimize travel time (if you get lucky and all your resources are close together, build one and use the spare on a barracks)
- Populate to a second town centre
- Stone Age, keep making citizens from town centre in the meantime
- Saturate other resource nodes (I go iron -> stone -> gold), but keep putting citizens on wood - you should be stockpiling some
- Build a rax if you haven't already. Unless you got immensely unlucky with the map generation, you should have some spare resources here; spend them either on a spare settlement or a temple
- Once Stone Age is done, tech to macemen and start making them
- You probably want another town centre somewhere around now
- Eventually you'll have to cut unit production to get to Copper. You should have everything saturated + 10-15 guys on wood by this point. I don't think there's a way of getting around this other than building a docks.
- Get granaries, profit.
Four or five granaries seems to be enough to start. Wood is a total non-issue as soon as you have enough for the granaries (which are crazy expensive wood-wise early on, as each individual farm takes 50). With one of each resource node saturated, you'll probably want to stick to one rax + an archery range (or anything else to use your gold on) + tech or two rax if you don't mind micromanaging production and playing it a bit risky. Obviously if you can get more stuff that'd be good.
Things still spiral out of control in the midgame for me, but it's better than it was.
Edit: Yeah, battles against the AI are now me building a sword army and attacking as soon as I have gunpowder units, using the longswordsmen as a screen. The AI consistently techs too slowly to deal with this. I'm scared to try out hard mode, though, given how many enemy units miraculously appear from nowhere on normal.