No it isn't.
An infinite supply of premium makes one basically unstoppable, but playing smart definitely lets you outperform people with more premium than you.
Feel free to accuse me of being new too. Weakass ad-hominem attacks are a good way to argue, especially against those with 100x your qualifications.
I mean I'll grant him that you won't be rank one (and even that a sufficiently smart player with a limited but large supply of premium) could whallop you if you weren't allowed to spend PP.
But the question becomes much more interesting if we assume that you're not allowed to purchase premium or use prem from a prior world, but you're allowed to spend premium you've made on *this* world. Because then you can sell off early iron for wood with an early investment in market level 2. That + quests + scavenging allows constant L5 barracks from basically the first minute of the game. On a world like this, that means leaving BP with more than 1K spears, and some LC assuming near optimal play.
I'm not doing that, and I made some major mistakes, and I'm not coplayed or playing actively, and man, scavenging is just overwhelmingly good for someone who knows how to use it. But every guide is wrong. I really want to just suggest that there's a toggle in the farm/rallypoint that works like the militia one, that just allows you to set troops in your village to scavenge "optimally" all the time, so troops just generate resources at the optimal scavenging rate.
That'd remove a lot of the need for coplaying/high activity in the earlygame. And directly incentivize new players to do the right thing.