[Tuidjy]

No-brainer may be an exageration, but I have found it works well for me.
I have all the turns from that game, so here is how I expanded:

Turn 1: 0
Turn 2: 0 (vampire count, but I was patrolling, no harm done)
Turn 3: 1
Turn 4: 0 (knights took a province)
Turn 5: 2 (temple went poof)
Turn 6: 1
Turn 7: 2
Turn 8: 0 (gems found in the wind)
Turn 9: 2 (rumors in capital, nasty)
Turn 10: 2

And then I contacted both my neighbors, and stuff slowed to one per turn.
But I was site searching as I was going. By turn 10, I had more than tripled
Pythium's starting gem income.

It is true that these scales leave you moderately poor, and force you to
expand agressively, but in return you get good research without relying on
accolytes. I never buy these unless I am out of cash, because a theurg is
a combat mage, while an accolyte is nothing but a cogwheel in a machine that
may fail to materialize. I think I made a total of three accolytes that game.

I rely on my pretender to defend against early intrusions. I also try not to
rely on gold income much. I instead try to quickly develop a gem economy, and
get my research to the point where troops do not matter in the least. In most
of my games, I trail on provinces, but it's been awhile since that bothered me.