There are only 2 useful troops - the beer/drum guys and thor's sons. They max out at lvl 25 and you should be able to win with ~28-29 of them upgraded into the 20's. A mix of both is ideal because beer guys buff up your dmg and thor's sons have the best dmg/health combination in the game (by far)
Don't waste points upgrading the research options - I went 1/1/2 and was able to upgrade more than enough talents. My biggest mistake the first time was wasting points because I didn't realize talents scale exponentially. Spending a lot of points on those research skills early on will result in you getting less other talents in the long run.
5 stars on hardest difficulty by 2600 without ever using animal farming. Could probably win closer to 2700 or 2800 with fishing. The key is saving up research points to use right away when each era starts (I was able to immediately upgrade fishing to 8 at 4000 and sailing to 8 at 3000 which made my population growth absurd - I only finished with 120k people but could have had a lot more). If you don't save research points, you end up getting screwed over with how research scales up - the most important things are not to waste research points and to focus on food rather than research early.
@Cor13Clang, you already get a slight damage bonus and lowly bonus for your team when someone leaves so in some circumstances, their leaving helps your team (especially with bad players leaving early when minis are more important). If you increase the bonus, people will start yelling at new players to leave a lot more. Players on your team leaving should be a bad thing.
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