Is this game too easy?

It took me a couple of weeks to get to rank 6th. If I ruin my economy I can beg money from the security council rather than go in to debt and no one wants to fight no matter how much I try to antagonise them. Where's the strategy, where's the diplomacy, where's the game? I've got a country (I did have 6 but it was 6 times as tedious) but what's next? What do I do with this country? I feel like I'm missing the point of the game.

What was your strategy to get up the ranks I’m still tryna get pass 34#
And probably if you was on white giant i would go to war with you
Yuh kno to test our power

I didn't have a strategy, I just built some corps and hospitals and schools.

The rankings are a very poor measure of power. All of the top players have won multiple awards which gives them a penalty to their score. It is quite easy to obtain a top score as a new player for that reason. I'm currently #1 on White Giant (with a 700 lead and growing), only because all the top players on the world have score penalties and I have none. If they didn't have the penalty I wouldn't sniff the top 10.

What's the best measure to use?

I look at players indexes (education, health, welfare, etc.), their game level (not just current but maximum achieved), where they are on finance/war rankings. You also could look at the score detail and add their penalty to their score if you want to see who is really doing better score wise than you.

Scores are also tied to game levels and new players tend to move up game levels to get the awards. Once you have reached it though, it is not sustainable. I try to keep my empire at GL 3 because I like to build corps at that level and it doesn't really cut into profits. I have been GL 8 though. I would not try to maintain that.

It's not difficult to maintain higher game levels if you know what you're doing, though obviously GL 3 is much easier to do so than GL 8. The highest I've seen since I came back is GL 11.