To add to Aleria, work your tavern, keep building it.
Event buildings will be a great help. Wikia has all the past and current event(s). Look thru the questline and get familiar with the terminology. Then have your city set up so you can complete the quests. There is no guarantee to getting complete event buildings but completing the questline in very important to event success.
Settlements were mentioned, great buildings there but it takes time to complete.
And to add to Ebeondi and multiple GBs, space management is important and how you spend FPs. Zeus, CoA and CdM are your primary military GBs.
Now, you can guild hop to get more coin. I think coin is a small bottleneck in the beginning, then supplies will be scarce until you get your city in a groove. Guild hopping will fix the coin issue and get you blueprints (some and it is random). With the new "aid all" button, you can zip thru for coin. For focused BPs taking the 5th position on GBs will get you cheap BPs, best done in a guild. Back when I started, LoA was always placed in the city. Now, I am not sure it is that important. I know some younger players that dont have it and they do fine. Then those 16 tiles generate more FPs. And do GBG advances, it is a source of FP income.
In my opinion, once you can do GE L4 in Iron age, then you can consider advancing age.
Some may tell you to get a ToR, Temple of Relics. It is a good GB and made for GE prizes. The problem, it takes 6x6, 36 tiles. For it to reward, you need to do encounters and spend FPs to level it. To do encounters, those military GBs are important to L10. To get them to L10, you need FPs. To get FPs, you need space, like the space a ToR would take. So, things are interconnected in this game.
There is only one bad decision that 99.9999% of the players will agree, dont get a Colosseum.
I would learn about recurring quests. I am not saying get a CF, you need other things first, but you can still do those quests, even a few help. do them with your collection and when you get enough coin and supplies, you can do a few unbirthday quests.