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.