Don't grind. Play to have fun.

Wait, you say your town of 30 people can't get a pylon without grinding 8 hours a day for three weeks, then getting your first pylon popped by Reiko after about 5 minutes, then grinding it all over again for another three weeks? Well I hate to break it to you but maybe just maybe, for your small city, building a pylon is a bad idea that will just burn your people out on the game and make them want to quit. Don't do it. Instead, build something fun.

Build the Eiffel Tower, just for fun. Build an aquatic stadium and host boat races, just for fun. Build a farley-war park and organize red team vs. blue team war game events, or civcraft LARPing campaigns, all just for fun. Have so much fun that your city becomes a cool place where players from all over the server want to hang out.

You've gotten this far, great! But uh-oh, it looks like while you were just concentrating on having fun, you accidentally got some immigrants because your city was such a fun place to be. So now you have 100 people instead of 30, and in between just having fun it looks like some of them are building a pylon. They can build that pylon part time, and have fun the rest of the time, because you have 100 fricking people.

3.0 right now is like a few tiny groups of bronze age Greeks trying to build a space shuttle, and freaking out because it's way beyond their abilities. Well duh, you're in the bronze age! Chill out, forget about space shuttles for a while, and just create some art and culture and political theory. You know, the kind of things that you need to have to bind groups of people together into civilization-sized entities. Solve the problem of creating a civilization, first, and in the end your space shuttles will build themselves.