Town
9 cottages
8 Barracks
4 Warehouses
+1 of everything else
City
20-22 farms
+rest is up to you
Why
9 Cottages will give you 40'500 citizens with taxation at 90%, and you only need 18'000 workers for your production. That means that you can easy use the rest for building troops or just rise the taxes.
8 Barracks is more than enough, you will at some point max out your army per city and you wont be able to train troops course of the upkeep cost. 8 barracks seem to be perfect, its not to few and not to many.
Warehouses are (probably) the best defense against plunder. Sure, archery towers will stop most attackers from taking a risk at attacking you for plunder but a combo of those two defense system will probably discurage anyone, especially if you will upgrade the warehouses to a higher level.
Warehouses are the best investment if you are totally new to the game, I suggest that you build and upgrade your warehouses before you start thinking about building 10'000 archery towers. 1'000 archery towers cost a lot of resources, and time, but they wont stop many from plundering you and when they do plunder you, all the towers will be destroyed.
Warehouses on the other hand wont be, and they will keep your resources safe. On top of that, the attacker wont attack you again since he know that he wont gain anything from you.
In later game there wont be any towers at all that will stop anyone from plundering you, you can have 15k towers but it still wont be enough. Warehouses on the other hand is something that the attacker wont be able to reach. Warehouses are freakishly good for the first day you play to the last one.
PS: I think that 1 L9 warehouses will hold 450k units of stuff, with reaserch it will be 900k. Thats enough to keep you safe over night. Get 4 of them.
