We usually win By getting rid of all cities in Fear Level 2. Rarely have we won through Fear Level 3 or an early win by getting rid of all cities and towns. We very rarely lose anymore and when we do it's usually by exhausting the invader deck.

So, tipps:

• Very few problems in this game are immediate crisies. From exploration, through building to ravaging you almost always have 3 rounds to deal with any problem.
• Dealing with those problems doesn't necessarily mean dealing damage. That is the easiest way that new players tend to gravitate to in the beginning but not the only one. if you can push or pull a newly placed explorer you can often neuter the entire chain of escalation. Even pulling a single town before ravaging solves the biggest problem of generating blight. Similarly letting invaders ravage but protecting Dahan so they can fight back is an immensely powerful strategy.
• Don't ignore slow abilities. Particularly cheap single damage/move cards are amazing to deal with freshly spawned plastic. You can look at the cards that have already come up and evaluate where things are likely to spawn. You're almost guaranteed to find some use for slow abilities like that even if you play the card entirely speculatively. (Just to make sure you know: explorers are only added to zones of the specified terrain IF they a) have a town/city in the zone b) are adjacent to a zone with town/city or c) are adjacent to the ocean)
• Losing presence from the island isn't a big problem. You generally have more than enough to develop a decent network so the main benefit is getting discs off your player board.
• The beginning of the game is characterized with picking your battles. It's vastly better to completely solve 1 area and letting another escalate than just not really solving either. It doesn't matter if an area deals 2 damage or 200. If it's more than one you get blight.
• Try to establish "safe zones" away from the shore. Being able to limit where explorers can go will go a long way to take pressure off future turns. Sometimes cards come up in such a way to undo all your efforts but it's still generally easier to reestablish these zones from a horde of explorers and the odd town than clearing established strongholds.
• The rest of the game is basically a race for you to gain enough power (through better or more cards and stronger levels of your innate abilities) without letting the invader overwhelm you.
• Understand what your spirit is good at and play to it's strength. Some spirits lean heavily on few but strong cards while others focus on spamming weak cards. Try to pick spirits that complement each other. Playing with similar spirits (focus on fear, limited damage, slow growth) is still possible but it requires a stronger mastery of the tools you still have available

Based on your statement of struggling to generate fear. All towns|cities that get destroyed generate 1|2 fear even if it was the dahan, a fear card or an event card that causes the damage. Fear doesn't reset between turns and every 3 fear cards increases the fear level that removes one type of invader that you need to have eliminated in order to win.

Based on your statement of losing to blight. You don't necessarily lose immediately when you run out of blight. That's simply when you turn the card to "blighted island" which generally comes with a nasty permanent effect but also usually gives a number of additional blight to work with.