Plunder
-Plunder the weak, spot early the neighbors that don't play much and the ones that have no defenses and plunder them as soon as novice protection is off.
-If someone's country is only a few cells and yours is much bigger, they don't play much and could be a good plunder target.
-Always make sure you gain profit by plundering, if you are losing too many units when plundering someone, it might not worth to keep plundering him until you are stronger.
-If a town has very low population and too high culture, it means it has minimal military buildings, and may or may not have many towers, keep that in mind when plundering.
Leveling up your hero
-Dealing damage to units and buildings is a great way to get experience points and levels. Build a few Primitive rams early and damage others' walls and towers for exp points, or wait and unlock Classical age rams which are stronger and faster.
Neighbors
-You must destroy them, start plundering them early as much as you can, if they have too strong defenses and you always lose when attacking, don't attack until you get stronger
You have to step on others and steal all of their resources to be a strong leaderism player :)
Or other leaderism players will do that to you.
Defense, defense, defense.
I have to disagree here, you could be the strongest leaderism player
with a big army in your neighborhood, with none or a few other weaker
leaderism players, you could plunder the weaker leaderism players and
the collectivism players whenever you like and control that
neighborhood.
Nobody would dare to attack you, so you wouldn't need towers, rarely, far away players would attack.
When there is competition in the neighborhood and you have other just
as strong leaderism players very close, you will of course need big
defenses because in the end they will want to destroy you.
A tip would be to not upgrade towers, until you are attacked, but have
some already built so you can be ready to upgrade them.