Unfortunately diplomacy is pretty much broken, and all AIs will attack you sooner rather than later, so you cannot go to the very high level and try forging one alliance against another alliance. Sadly it's like that in almost every strategy game I can think of. At least everybody against the player is better than everybody *****ing out from every fight and letting you do whatever you want like in Colonization. So don't think too much about diplomacy.
You should have some idea on how you're going to play. In my last game with Egyptians I took all my armies, bought all the mercenaries I could, and expanded in three directions at once, west to Siwa and Cyrene, east to Petra, and Bostra, and north-west to Kydonia, and Sparta. Initial battles were tough, but this way I had a decent empire before anybody could even react. This plan was very ambitious, and it's quite likely that it might not have worked on higher difficulty levels, but it's a good idea to have some plan before starting to play.
It's important to move early, as you get some decent army to start with, often with units that you won't be able to make for a long time, while everybody's armies are still quite small and many settlements are barely defended, especially the rebel ones.
It's plenty of fun to start a war, but before you do think how you're going to end it. Can you take all enemy settlements quickly? Or at least all that are nearby, if the enemy is all over the place like Greek Cities, Carthage, and Parthia.
If you don't think of it, you might get into a long trench warfare that someone else will use to backstab you. In my last game I wasn't thinking enough about this and at one point I had wars with Parthia, Armenia, Seleucids, Pontus, Greek Cities, Macedon, Thrace, and all four Roman factions.
Your armies are investment. Don't keep them in secure cities. Actually don't keep them in cities at all - peasants should patrol cities, all your armies should be in the field fighting. Upkeep is very high compared to initial cost. Typically cost is about three turns worth of upkeep. So if you have a unit that's going to spend four or more turns doing nothing it's cheaper to disband it and make a new one when it's needed. You cannot make them as fast as you'd like to and you'd lose all experience, so maybe the threshold is higher than four, but armies should fight.
If you need some troops fast, and are far from your lands you might want to get some mercenaries, but normally cheaper and stronger units are available in your cities. Exception are units that you cannot produce but would like to, like Sarmatian Cavalry, and Createan Archers, depending on your faction.
Bribing is even more dubious practice. It costs more to bribe than to recruit an army (even mercenary army), defeat whoever you were thinking of bribing, and disband just afterwards. Bribing should be thought of as a really special case situation. Maybe if you want to bribe generals, because you cannot normally recruit them. But you can recruit a unit, take it into a fight, and you have a chance of getting "man of the hour" free general. I got plenty of generals this way.
Navy is expensive. You can do two things with Navy. In early game you want to transport armies from one coast to the other in a single turn (or otherwise as quickly as possible), so they are never vulnerable. There's no point fighting at this point, unless someone is trying to blockade you and you really have no choice.
The other thing is total domination of a sea. If you have plenty of money you can buy enough ships to take total control of a large body of water, like "whole Mediterranean sea east of Sicily". Just buy loads of ships, attack everywhere it in, then you can blockade everything, and safely transport all your troops.
There's little reason to go between the two extremely. Semi-strong navy that won't protect your transports is just throwing money away. If your navy isn't useful any more, just disband it.
When you're waging a war on a strategic level it's important to achieve local superiority of force. It doesn't matter who's got more units on the entire map. What matters is who's got more and better units in the place of battle. So go completely out of proportion, committing all your armies you can to the small part of the front where you want to achieve your objectives, like conquering enemy city, or destroying his not very strong armies. If AI has weakly protected settlement, take your big army and take it. If it has medium sized army in the field, crush it with army twice the size. If it took all its strongest units and heads towards your capital, raid his territory and force it to go back home.
You will be much more mobile if you have paved roads, a bit of navy, and no sense of fear. It's even more important to have all your battle troops on the front, not back home patrolling streets.
The biggest factor however is economy strong enough that you can easily raise new armies and replace your loses while the opponent cannot, even if they manage to win a few big battles, because that's how Rome became great!
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