After you get your first city running, it is time to start your second one.
With the items you get while running through the initial quests, you should receive enough medals to make your first Rank/Title upgrade.
Doing this allows you to own 1 more city. Every time you upgrade your TITLE, you are able to obtain another city, all the way until you are a prinzessin and can hold 10 cities at a time.
Now, your first city is an all-purpose city, but none of your future ones should be. You should, at this point, determine what style of player you will be.
Will you be a player that always sits at 0 food with monster armies or do you want to keep your food levels above 0 for all towns at all times.
Deciding this question will determine if you want to have any Farm towns or now.
A farm town will consist of 40 farms with a level 10 Town Hall, and all 10 of your valleys will be level 9 or 10 lakes. This makes your food production the highest possible, but again, if you don't mind sitting at 0 food, you will be more resourceful and have larger supplies of Iron/Lumber for your troops.
Let's assume you don't want to sit at 0 food all the time. This means I would make the next city a Lumber town. In a lumber town, I make 40 Mills (level 9) with a level 10 Town Hall (TH) and have 10 level 9 or 10 forests as my valleys. In the town portion of this city, you want to get a barracks to level 9 fast, and have the technologies required for making Ballistas and Transports complete so you can build your NPC farming army.
You will start with farming level 1 NPCs, but your goal is to farm level 5 NPCs. Before your techs are leveled up completely, plan on having 600 Ballistas and Transports to farm them.
As your archery and Military Tradition levels go up, your Ballista requirement will go down, and as your logistics tech goes up, your transports requirement will go down. By the time you have farmed enough medals to make your next rank, you will hopefully also be strong enough to capture a level 8 NPC (make sure you have the "Queen" or "King" quest to conquer a level 8 city before doing this.)
To get a level 8 NPC close to you, conquer a level 8 flat adjacent to one of your towns, build a city on it, and abandon it. The space where the city you built was, should now be a level 8 NPC city. To conquer a level 8 NPC, put all of your heroes in Wiseman's gear. Your first attack should be 90k or 100k warriors (depending on your rally spot level).
This should be followed by 8 other waves of 20k warriors each in 20-30 second intervals. You keep sending 20k warriors over and over again until the loyalty reaches 0 (can be seen in battle reports) and the city is yours.
This will be your first farm city but don't build it up much because you will replace it with the level 10 NPC you will conquer next. The easiest way to do this to conquer a level 10 flat adjacent to one of your cities, build a new city on it, and abandon it.
Doing so will leave a level 10 NPC right next to you (which will disappear at server maintenance overnight). This means that you should not abandon the city, until the day you are ready to conquer the level 10.
To conquer the level 10 city, you should have Combat Technologies to level 10 (with the exception of compass still being at 9.)
Once you have your heroes above 250 Attack, then you can research compass to level 10.
First wave against the level 10 NPC city should be 2k Warriors and Workers, 4k scouts, and 92k archers. Following this wave, you should have 8 other waves ready to go in 20-30 second intervals of 10k warriors and archers.
Completing this quest will give you your Queen or King as a reward.