These simple rules were what made me start beating the computer on hard:
1) Attack his woodcutters with 5 un-upgraded hips.
2) As soon as you've made some more send another 5 or 6 hips to his goldminers.
3) Do NOT fight his army. run away. This is the most important rule.
If you send your cav to his base the towers and cav counter-units will kill your weak hips easily. If you send them in simply to annoy his villies, he can't get resources, which means he can't build an army! (all the while your villies are getting heaps of resources and you're spamming hips) -- just keep spamming hips and get the upgrades once your hip armies combined are sizable.
So after annoying his villies, run away -- when he stops chasing you, run back and annoy his villies again. If possible add a few new cav to the initial raiding army (keep it around 6 cav). But it is better to make several raiding parties than one large one (then he doesn't know where to send his counter-units).
So the golden rule is to keep annoying his villies -- you don't have to kill them (although its nice if you can), just stop them from working which, until they start working again, is better than a dead villie coz they're taking up pop space.
4) Once your cav are running rampant, take out houses. Then his woodcutters still can't go back to cutting wood, which demotes them to house builders. He'll then gather even fewer resources, meaning you will crush his small army.
[This message has been edited by AT_serf (edited 02-18-2004 @ 09:05 PM).]