Patient OCD technique:
1) Start over on another world
2) DON'T ADVANCE INTO IRON AGE UNTIL INSTRUCTED TO FURTHER DOWN THIS LIST
3) Don't negotiate for any sectors on the continent map unless a quest requires it
4) Motivate or polish all of your neighbors daily. You can use 'Aid' starting out, since all of your neighbors will be in the same age as you. The reason you want to do this is the chance of getting a random blueprint of the age of building you polivate. The more you do, the greater chance you'll get one.
5) Research only the techs you need to have only Blacksmiths in your city for supplies, and as many as you can fit an even number of, only Chalets for housing and only Taverns for happiness. Have no goods buildings (you'll get goods some other way, and plenty of them too). The idea here is to cram as many functioning Blacksmiths as you can into your city. You really don't even need your people to be happy for this phase, except you'll build more coin and supplies for the next age if they are happy. You won't need any barracks either. You don't need to concern yourself with the continent map beyond completing the tutorial, and city defense is an illusion at this stage in the game. As long as you're ready to collect when your production is ready to collect, you'll be fine. (Collecting on time actually applies to later ages as well)
6) Complete and/or skip tech quests until you get to the quests titled "Recurring", then abort your way through these until you get to the one that asks for 2 helmets, which is the product of two 1-day Blacksmith productions. Accept this quest. Ideally, you will have two such productions ready for collection.
7) Collect from two Blacksmiths that were set for 1-day production. These should be easy to find because all of your Blacksmiths should be set to 1-day productions.
8) Complete the quest for the helmets and collect your random reward, which could be coins, supplies, goods, a medium FP pack, 20 diamonds (once only), or a BLUEPRINT of your age. (Since you are in the Bronze Age, the blueprint can only be for one or the other of two Great Buildings - Zeus or The Tower of Babel. This is important, and this is the main reason why you're not advancing into Iron Age just yet (the other reasons will become apparent). When your random reward from a recurring quest is a blueprint, it is only a blueprint of your age or lower. When you are in Bronze Age, you have a 50% chance for a blueprint of either of the two Bronze Age Great Buildings. When you are Iron Age, that chance drops to a 25% chance for a blueprint from one of four Great Buildings, since there are two Great Buildings for every age.)
Both Zeus and Babel are worth having, and you will have plenty of goods to build both of them from the random rewards you are getting from repeating this recurring quest, which reminds me...
9) After collecting your reward for completing the quest for 2 helmets, abort your way through all the other recurring quests until you get back to that very same quest. Accept it, and collect from two more Blacksmiths. Complete the quest, collect the reward, abort the other recurring quests until you get to this one, accept it, collect from two more Blacksmiths, etc. until you have collected from all of your Blacksmiths.
10) Set all of your Blacksmiths again for 1-day productions. Alternatively, you may want to mix up completion times so clicking through the other recurring quests is less grindy. As long as you start production times in pairs it'll work out, whatever schedule you use.
11) Once you have complete sets of the Zeus and Babel blueprints, feel free to advance into Iron Age, though you might choose to stick around in Bronze Age a while longer and keep milking those quests for goods and FP packs, depending on your tolerance for tedium. There are these recurring quests at the end of every age's tech tree, but the Blacksmith is ideally suited for completing a great number of them as it has the smallest footprint of any of the supply buildings. Eventually though, you will want to move on.
I started 6 new cities last summer. Two of them I kept in Bronze Age until I had both GBs and hundreds of BA goods besides. The other four I advanced to Iron Age. It only took me 2-3 weeks of aiding neighbors daily and doing the blacksmith grind to get all my BPs for Zeus and Babel in my BA cities. It took me at least 2 months to have the same result in my Iron Age cities. You cannot contribute to other players' GBs while you're in Bronze Age, but at least for me, the evidence is clear as to which method produces quicker results.
A note about medium forge point packs: You'll end up with a lot of these doing the recurring quest grind. It's okay to spend a few on your shiny new GBs, particularly for getting them out of sticks, but my advice is to save them as much as possible, until you've been playing a while and can truly understand how useful mass quantities of stored FP can be.
Edit: After you've completed and collected on all your blacksmith quests, complete and collect on the coins quest. You may even be able to do this one a few times before the blacksmiths are ready to go again. As with the blacksmith quests, just abort through everything else until you hit the coins quest, complete and repeat.
