[gowb]

Grab four elephants in the beginning with your starting money, and those should last you forever as long as you protect them correctly. Hold / Attack against cavalry, straight up rush everyone else. This is assuming indie provinces are on 5 as normal, and not buffed up. That's what I did in my current game and I had no problem expanding really quickly. As for pretender, I took an awake rainbow pretender to make sure i could find enough gems to summon awesome stuff and decent scales (luck especially) to make things a bit easier.