[Micah]

What units you recruit, diplomatic options, and an early game rush are all going to depend on your nation.

Raiding is more important than hitting things with huge armies most of the time, taking castles is generally the only time when you'll want to have a large amount of troops in one place.

Early on mages aren't going to help you do much of anything since nothing is researched, so they should be searching or researching. Bless nations will have ot recruit priests for blessing though.

Mercs are great, but never put yourself in a spot where losing the bid will set you back a turn of expansion.

Early expansion is critical, and being too big means you have a stick to beat people with, which discourages alliances against you, being too small means you're just lunch for one (or more) of your neighbors.

I'm a fan of manual searching, but I'm about the only one I know that likes it, so I don't bother researching the search spells.

And having a good ally helps out a lot, grab one if you can, but I'd avoid a large coalition, since then they can all gang up on you if you get too large. Having just one ally provides a really good reason for them NOT to betray and gang up on you, since I know I'd devote all my energy to making sure my former ally didn't profit from his betrayal once it became clear that I was overmatched by an alliance agaisnt me.