I broke down to get premium. I am extremely weak to games that are lots of fun being ruined by long turn times. I wanted to play single player so I could move a t my own pace and join more games so I would have more to do.
Basically I discovered that using goblin hordes to plunder the shit out of everything is super optimal. My ideal start is southern goblins with 2 nearby hordes and 50 orange. Then I can grab 2 goblins. Then hopefully some orcs and maybe some purple shit. After the plunder turns on in 10 hours you can immediately plunder your main city and the 2 others. Then you spawn 3 more goblins and maybe work on taking some empty lands. You move the 3 new goblins to the highest level orange lands and maybe a 3-4 market red. Meanwhile you set up a new market in the plundered lands. Then you grab taxes and the markets get made and you plunder again getting 10 per land on the first 3 lands plus you grab the value from the new lands. Then you build the 6 markets. Then you've got a shit ton of orange. You want to keep making hordes and getting one on each land. If you are smart you can get on a schedule where you plunder and rebuild in one tax cycle so that you get 2 coins per land from tax, which is like 14 orange a tax cycle but also get that 70 orange per tax cycle from plunder. Ideally you have 1 horde per land constantly plundering because thats a net gain of 6+2 coins per land. Not only do you get an amount of coins equal to the average of a level 4 market but you don't have that initial coin lost to market upgrades, and you get the average 20 coins PER LAND from the markets that already exist. So that's well over 200 coins a game if you expand well plus not spending 20-40 per land to get high markets all while maintaining an income equal to top level markets. And plunder lets you expand into other colors super easy because you get 10-40 coins right away after hitting a land. So I I start as goblins and expand into red I can get an easy 30-50 red coin boost from plunder to recruit more indie armies or build forts or even create new armies from my lands and expand faster. I generally like to use up all my TDs every day getting indies on the first day.