Any other players feeling a bit...unfulfilled with the range of options we have to attack our opponents?

I'm a bit frustrated by the fact that it is so incredibly easy for even a semi-active player to be able to juggle their troops and goods to prevent them from ever being lost.

I realize I could teleport my city right into their midst to take care of the distance problem, but that would require me to need coins pretty quick to keep buying those porters. Is that the intention?

Now, I've tried some sneaky tactics. Hitting multiple cities at once, hitting them spread apart just enough to make travel between them difficult, coordination with alliance mates, lots and lots of stuff. I'm able to put about 10 armies in the field, each of which is able to crush any of my targets pretty much at will, due to overwhelming advantage in numbers and tech.

Apparantly none of this matters, because if I don't wait till 4am to do my dirty tricks, and my enemy is able to come on once every few hours, he can just spend the resources or money, or ship it out of a city, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, despite the fact that I often outnumber him 20-100 to 1.

The meanest tactic I've devised is to drive them into riots. Same sort of thing you do if you're actually trying to capture a city from someone. Break their army/fortifications, then spam scout attacks to rapidly lower loyalty and raise public grievance to the point where they riot. It just seems WRONG that my meanest tactic relies on being hit by 1 soldier a million times. It's really the only way I have to 'damage' someone who dodges and will never fight, by crippling their economy.

Why can't I intercept their armies on the move, or see them if I scout the city they marched from? Why can't I camp outside a city and prevent goods from being sent inside or troops from making it through the gates? If he's going to keep his gates closed and his goods in production queues constantly because hes smart, I need to be damaging his buildings or something when I attack.

As it stands, you can't really do much to half intelligent players if you aren't willing to burn coin costing items. Am I missing some mechanics I'm unaware of? Am I not creative enough in my dirty tricks? (They are significantly more creative than what I directly talked about, don't want to spill all the beans heh.) Am I being incredibly dumb? Or is this lack of any meaningful way to fight something that bothers other people too?