The game is effectively a race to pillage the barbarian villages on the map, as they're a significant source of points. You'll want to spread out as quickly as possible, and block your opponent from accessing as many camps as possible. Military cards are best early to steal VP from camps, move your units around, and threaten greater military presence to take camps. Siege Towers are especially good for stealing VPs from camps without having to surround them. Other buildings should mostly only be used to secure territories early on. Focus ones with low resource costs.

Early offerings should be to Minerva to draw cards, and Ceres, to grant a lot of resources (much faster than building up a chain of production buildings). Once you play your 2 starting military buildings, you'll want an offering to Mars to get your last 3 in one shot. Mid-late game, you'll want to continue to combo Minerva with Ceres or Neptune to fill your hand, then gain a bunch of resources or money.

Maritime buildings are vastly underrated for their potential to generate points. A single one that sells 2x lot of 2 resources for 6 VP is as good as capturing a fully-stacked Barbarian camp. And you can activate it again by playing more ships!

While many buildings encourage stacking 2-5 buildings on the same space, this is only possible if the game drags out (usually if one player fully surrounds a camp but doesn't play a military unit to capture it). Only at this point is it beneficial to start stacking buildings in a single region. You'll still want to spread out to deny as many spaces to your opponent(s) as possible. Keep an eye out for temples that are easy to max out (# of terrain type you control, # of resources). Temples are great, but if it requires too much setup to score one, you may be better off just gaining points from barbarians and boats, then rushing to end the game by capturing the last camp.