From what i can see having either high Residences and mass Troops or high Military Complexes and mass Tanks are the best ways to go.regarding Military strength. Is this true? I have seem many uberTroop armies whilst Spying, is this because they are the most effective fighting forces due to cheapness and numbers?

No. They are in fact, the least cost effective units.

Troops = 1 attack and 1 Def (0.5 NW each)
Jets = 2 attack, cannot defend (0.6 NW each)
Turrets = 2 def, cannot attack (0.6 NW each)
Tanks = 2 attack, 2 def (2.0 NW each)

But tanks also cost 4-5x as much to buy. Furthermore, if you PS away your tanks, then they are not defending your country while they are out on the PS for that 18 hours, 10 hours or 2 hours, depending on which server you are on.

Jets and Turrets also consume the least upkeep for the same $$ value. If you are in GDI, or you spy people in GDI (the version of GDI on Express/Primary), you will often see countries only carry jets and turrets exclusively.

Hmmm ... i have much to learn. Thank you! One more question - how long does Age last? How many turns?

depends on which server you play set lasts from week to 2 months and turn rate varies from 1 turn every 4 mins to 1 turn every 25 mins (plus login bonus on some servers if away over 18 hrs).

On the portal page linked below it tells you the start/end dates of each server:
http://www.earthempires.com/portal

yah, they are a bit mental with stating something that should start on the 1st of the month.

why 1st of month?

duno

But even with the extra (1.4NW each)on the tanks, rnt tanks a good unit to have considering the beneficial fact ur cloaked to spy operations? I know that ur open to attack when they(tanks) are out on PS but wat say Tanks & Turrets? or is that ganna blow out the expenses to far??...

no idea what did you mean but i'll try answer.

if you plan to grab by using tanks then better have alot those so that not all your tanks are ps'd away leaving your defenses crippled.

Tanks have no effect on the ability of others to spy on you.

There are only a few reasons to have tanks:

1) Protection against (or commission of) artillery barrages. If you're playing on one of the servers that doesn't allow players to use special attacks unless they've been hit more than once by the same player, and you don't attack anybody more than once, then this reason goes out the window. On other servers where this restriction is not in place, you want to keep just enough tanks to protect against random artillery barrages.

2) Some people aren't good at math (or are just lazy) and fail to properly compute the tank's defensive strength of 4, resulting in them bouncing attacks against you. This is probably too rare an occurrence though to be worth the extra upkeep cost of a huge tank collection.

3) Since a lot of people don't carry many tanks, if they spy on you and see that you have a lot, they may decide to look elsewhere for land, rather than risk you going ape on them. Again though, this probably only deters just a few people.

Depending on the server you're on, prices on turrets and jets will usually be around the $150 range, while tanks are normally around $550. You'd need to buy 2 jets and 2 turrets to equal 1 tank, so the turret/jet combo costs about $50 dollars more. BUT, the higher upkeep costs, and the fact that you can't use PS if you're heavy on tanks, far outweigh the slight increase in cost from buying jets/turrets. I think.

All of the above goes for troops as well, except that on solo servers, troops serve even less purpose than tanks. Defending agaist guerilla strikes on a server where you can't be teamed up on is pointless. Any damage a lone attacker could do to you with GS would be quickly repaired as you use your turns and your population comes back (assuming you're not holding onto a huge pile of food). When I used to play the tourney server, I always left myself wide open on troops, hoping that anybody who got angry with me would choose that route for vengeance.

bonus

x2

Tanks are the only unit that can artillery barrage.