Okay, well let me specific then for you

If you happen to find a Lizard Province, build a Lab and recruit Lizard Shamans to use as Communion Slaves and Celestial Masters as communion Masters. Good spells to look and use are Acid Rain, Flaming Arrows, Wind Guide, Relief.

If you can get a semi-decent gem income fairly quickly, rely on your Celestial Soldiers, Summer Lions, Fall Bears, Winter Wolves and others to back up your national units.

In general the more archers the better. Since you have 2 types, the normal compositebowman and the imperial. It's generally a better idea to go with the normal and use spells like Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows to cause havok. Unless you have alot of resources and can afford the normal ones. But in that case I'd probably get X-bows instead of normal bowmen.

TC has poor repellers, they have no long weapons in which to repel with or fight against repellers, so it's a better choice to go with the more damaging Falchions than normal spear Imperial Infantry.

Unless you have enough to make a very good blessing, stay away from most the mounted troops. Even Red Guard are not that impressive. If you get into a situation where your opponents are not using fodder, pick up some Imperial Horseman and use the lances to tear up a flank.

Other than that, I can't really offer any help. One of the ways to play TC more effectively is to have a SC take provinces early in order to take the edge off of having naturally weaker troops, but since you can't do that, you are going to have to manage however you can until you get a good strong core beneath you

And by all means, have fun no matter what. That is of course what the game is about