Tactics revolve around scoring points and preventing your opponents from doing the same. You and your opponents can only score points if leaders are on-board, so you want to keep yours on and theirs off, especially since their leader can often prevent your leader of similar colour being placed. Thus an position is to have leaders anchored by temples-with-treasuries next to monuments, which not only generate points but also mitigate effects of disasters since their size means they cannot be cut off from all adjacent tiles. Some measure of protection can be gained by attempting to maintain four red tiles and two others, at least early on. Don't build monuments off four red tiles. Don't leave any empty spaces adjacent to 2 or more red tiles. Use all your tiles in a conflict, there is no point in losing if you could have won. Inter-kingdom conflict is a good way to remove a leader from a space surrounded by four red tiles, into which you can place one of your leaders.

Experiment with ways of placing leaders without giving opponents _any_ chance of placing theirs. This means blocking spaces in which they might place extra temples or leaders. Block them from treasuries. Rivers are obvious blocking terrain since only blue tiles can go here, thus the treasury in the area of confluence of the rivers is most interesting. Snaking out toward unclaimed treasuries is a tactic but long thin strings of tiles are vulnerable to disasters.

Changing empires by repositioning leaders can often be a good tactic so long as you choose the right one. Concentrating on two colours of points early on, then the other two later on, is a standard tactic but the game seems to push you this way in any case. Going after treasuries may help you to second or third place but not to first, since their "fill-in" effect is limited by growing differences in point colours, so that treasuries in excess of a few are valuable only if held in multiples of four.

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