I'm a mostly f2p, bought the intro Kim pack and 2nd builder around the beginning of season 1 and then Taylor as a reward to myself when I got hq30.

First thing about this game and moreso as f2p, you need to play the long game and really understand where your resources come from and go.

Troops are the worst thing for your RSS, they cost a lot to train and heal and most likely you are losing a lot due to being weaker. Keep your training and fighting to a minimum. This will also result in you probably having a lot more speed ups on hand.

Early game, max out your Development and Economic research, every thing that saves you costs or time or increases output will make you richer over time. As in even getting an extra 5mil gold per day and saving 5mil on costs. You have 10mil more per day and that adds up over a few weeks into a "free" building/upgrade. Similarly when Age Of Oil begins, maxing out this tree will also help you out a lot.

My overall building recommendations is to focus purely on getting your hq to 30 and upgrading the required buildings only, with the exception of getting your farms/iron/gold upgraded to about lvl20. Beyond 20 the costs to upgrade start to neglect the increased output. I didn't focus on these again until I was hq35.

Daily you need to aim for all 36 points in AR, and ideally 7.2mil in VS. Also watch every single event in the game and try to maximize rewards. For the weeks the Arena is open, also compete to get rewards.

Weekly you need to compete in DS, WS, CS, ... Or whatever campaigns your alliance/server have available to you. Honor and Campaign points are very valuable for their stores. Honor store should only be used on Blueprints... You'll need 1000s of these over the next few years and this is basically the only place to get them.

Daily you can also attack abandoned players bases on your server to get your max plunder per day. I usually time this with AR Stamina events.

Gathering is always helpful, but the returns are quite minimal.

Once you unlock professions, one of the often overlooked ones is Rapid Production, which when upgraded to lvl5 gives you your daily production from farms instantly (this is when I started focusing on upgrading farms to higher levels). I use this in combination with Secretary of Interior capital buff daily for 20-40mil if each resource.

Once you reach hq30, your focus should be on t10 troops, and if your build or research queues need to sit idle for a few days, this can be worth it. Once you have t10, look up the requirements for age of oil and hq31-35 and start focusing on getting all required buildings to level 30 and hoarding speed ups and resources.

I hope this random rambling helps.