Was going to reply to say the same thing. It's tempting to take neutral cities at the start and sometimes I do it, but it's almost always a mistake, and I can usually tell when other players do it and they make easy pickings. It takes a long time to recover from taking a city, and the payoff isn't worth it until you have a lot of them.

It's better to cover a large swathe of territory. This can hide where your general is, and every 25 turns you can collect armies from the squares. Build up that way and then you wait for someone next to you to get into a fight with someone else, or take a neutral city, and then bomb in on them in force when they can't defend, and take advantage of all of their hard work.

There's also a bit of a "dark forest" aspect to the game, where you can benefit from being hidden for a long time at the beginning of the game, but you have to trade this off with the disadvantage of not being able to build adequate forces in that time.

I'm "bubbles" in the game.

In high level play you have to manage your land, the hard thing is how to find the optimal route to collect your army: It's advisable to take around 15-18 turns to collect your army from an area and attack in the remaining 10-7 turns, so you can attack before the enemy numbers increase. In high level 1v1 play what matters most is the area you have, if you can get +1 area per 25 rounds from your enemy you'll probably win.

But! As both of you collect more and more area it gets really time consuming and after a point you just can't collect your army optimally. I'd argue that the biggest difference between skill levels at the highest levels is how efficient the collecting is. At that point you'll need cities. Always look for the opponent's counter to know how many cities your opponent has.

Not that it matters but I was a top 5 1v1 player quite a while ago.

I don't propose taking a city, waiting for recuperation, and then attacking an opponent. I propose taking a city, then soon taking another, then another, then another. Basically moving along an exponential growth curve. If you get lucky and no one attacks you during that period, you stand a very good chance of winning. Even if someone does attack you, the rapid regen from all your cities gives you a fighting chance. This strategy works especially well if you discover a lot of cities in your region during the early game.

The problem with attacking an enemy is that it's easy to get into a war of attrition where you both fall behind other players.

I think it's important to emphasize that you won't win against random luck without the rush strategy:

- If you begin in a corner (best) or side (ok), you can win if the side opposite to the one you are rushing towards does not rush you. If you begin in the center there is no way to win.

- To rush wait until ~17 because then you'll fill a full run before your lands get 2, enabling a second rush if the first fails.

If you win against one player before 50 seconds the chances get exponentially higher to win. Beat 2 in the first 100 seconds and you probably have 90% chance of steamrolling the entire board.