Hello Lord Atlas,
Don't forget to "spam" villagers/gatherers: no IDLE time for your TC, please. That will put your eco to the same level as its eco. Pay attention to the pop limit, and build a house before you really are obliged to do.
Once you have the same level for eco, you should be able to defend yourself, and attack too. You just need to advance early anough, and have a minimum defense to be able to counter his first attack. If you're fast enough to advance to classical, you can even be the first to attack. If so, you can build your case :-)
To advance as fast as possible, there are some recipe (build orders) that helps a lot. You can find one, and tweak it to your own needs. Advancing to classical is, anyway, focussing mainly on food, plus checking that you'll have enough wood/gold for your temple (assign few workers on those if you need so).
Also: raid to kill its villies to slow down its eco.
And finally, as already said by Carwash_II, you can use walls to ease your work, because AI is having a problem with walls: leave only one hole in your walls, and the AI will always try to enter by that hole. That makes it easy to defend yourself...
But it is more rewarding to beat it without the walls trick.
[This message has been edited by U977 (edited 09-13-2004 @ 06:21 AM).]