There are three things that you will learn quickly about playing on the internet: 1) human's abilities vary more widely than the computer's. 2) lag sucks 3) many players like to play at speed=1.5 or even 2.0. Expert human players are dramatically better than the computer. Even an average player in Kali or in the rated rooms in the Zone will crush a ``hard'' computer opponent.
Lag not only slows down the game, it makes some things much harder. Players often like to compenstate for lag by increasing the speed. Although this does speed the game up, it also makes it much harder to get your ecomony going quickly.
Lag also makes advanced hunting techniques much more difficult (which is part of the reason that I call them advanced). Moving elephants is dangerous with lag. And hunting gazelles can be quite frustrating and non-productive.
I greatly prefer playing at speed=1.0 because at higher speeds strategy tends to be less important than how fast you can click. Someone once referred to playing at speed=2.0 as ``Nintendo AoE''. However, many players like to play at faster speeds, so I learned to play at faster speeds.
Faster speeds, like lag, make advanced hunting techniques difficult. And, hence at fast speeds I tend to avoid those. Other than that, the only thing that I do differently is that I have all three villagers start building the first house and name them all unit 3. I then send each of the three in different directions as quickly as I can (just one click for each). When I find the berries, ``3; click'' brings them back to the berries. I also use three explorers at fast speeds, expecting at least one to be killed by a lion.