[MaxWilson]

One more thought on quicker expansion--it may be that you're jumping the gun and trying to expand too quickly at first, before your army is quite big enough. Depending upon what nation you're playing, waiting an extra turn or two to build some extra crossbowmen/archers can mean the difference between taking 10 losses per province and 1-2 per province. It's also possible that you're doing the opposite, taking several turns to build resource-heavy sacred troops (e.g. Living Pillars for Atlantis) when all you need for expansion are enough cheap troops to rout the indies. Some nations have terrific sacred troops, and for others they're just a distraction, at least until you're done expanding and are actually in a war of attrition with an enemy nation. (Sometimes not even then, depending upon the unit and your bless.)

I should also mention that building another fort early (with a mercenary if necessary) is a great boost to expansion because you can crank out twice as many national troops per turn. Obviously you have to have enough gold income to afford twice as many troops, but you should probably have a second fort by mid-Winter of the first year.

-Max

P.S. Also, about defense: 21 PD is usually only about 30-40 cheap units, in smallish squads that rout pretty easily. Instead of boosting PD to 35-40 levels, just add detach some troops from a moving army and leave them in the province. PD has a commander, so the garrison troops will still fight, and if they rout they'll flee into adjacent provinces instead of evaporating like defeated PD does. Works best with support troops like archers, but may be worth doing even with normal troops. The downside is that unlike PD, garrison troops cost upkeep.