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Early on Try to level up your ruler and heroes early by taking fights against npc marauder armies on the map they’re usually sitting on pick ups or resource nodes. Also make sure to take out any infestations (the red marauder armies) because their camps spawn roving armies that will attack you and eliminating them gives you items and gold plus other stuff depending on traits and such. Look to clear and occupy wonders, if they’re too far from your city build an outpost and a work camp to claim it. You can see how tough they are by clicking on it, usually you just want to do bronze early and you can check the power level by clicking to start the fight but you can cancel and comeback later if you need to level up to clear it. You need food to get more tiles for your cities and the non special province improvements can be built faster depending if you have say two foresters which will speed up your granary or whatever just hover over them and it’ll tell you. Focus on growing your first city and being able to afford hero units when they become available. There’s usually a free city or more near you and one is your exact race so give them a whispering stone and make sure to vassalize them before another ruler does unless you’re reaver or took the chosen destroyer trait etc. then you want to take it by force quickly. Theres honestly a lot of stuff to do and many ways to do it and you’ll find the groove and play style that suits you most. If it’s story realms those can be hard or just abnormal in how you beat them compared to just doing a custom or regular premade realm. Honestly theres a lot but just keep playing if it’s too hard just tone down the difficulty and remember there’s multiple ways to win some builds and play styles are slow early then you pop off while others you go aggro early it’s mostly up to what you choose and your play style. Also you can enable allied victory so you can just try to help an allied ai ruler win