[Tolkien]

Well, Magic 1 helps, but the main thing is that even if you focus all of your mages to research from Turn 1, it isn't going to be extremely significant.

Alright, working hypothetically: We're building 4 Second Tiers in the first four turns and sending them blood hunting. Assuming a mid-sized province without unrest (or capital with patrolling), each has a 50% chance of getting d6+1 slaves (at least 2).
Turn 1: No Blood Hunting.
Turn 2: 1 Blood Hunter. (patrolling as we wait for another turn of rangers)
Turn 3: No Blood Hunting. (move the Second Tiers to capture a mid-pop province with your commander).
Turn 4: 2 Blood Hunters, 2 50%. (we move the next two hunters to another province).
Turn 5: 3 Blood Hunters, 3 50%.
Turn 6-12: 4 Blood Hunters, 4 50%.
(you can also just use your capital and patrol that, which speeds up expansion, but means you can get unrest in your cap if you get lucky with the d6 of hunting, and that can hurt abit).

I've also just run a couple (lost count, a few dozen) test runs in SP, up to the end of year 1 following this.
Depending on how luck goes, you should easily be able to pull up 44 slaves by the end of turn 12. I've done a few test runs and 4 might even be too many: I've pulled up 44 by turn 7 (with a bit of luck on the d6+1) on a few trials and always gotten the 44 by the time my pretender awakens. That still means you have 8 turns to recruit mages for research or commanders to lead expansion armies.

The research lost isn't too important at all. Ulm in Year One isn't dependent on magic to expand: you aren't Bogarus with the crappy troops and where research is ESSENTIAL to your survival: your main blood goal, Vampire Counts, for much of the earlygame/early midgame, can already be summoned. Your troops are good enough to kick off expansion, and you're just putting off your signature battlefield spells (in evocation, Iron Blizzard and to a lesser extent, Shadow Blast) and Construction-4 to near the end of Year Two. It would indeed be nice to have these spells earlier, but by sacrificing a few turns without Iron Blizzard and other magics, you're setting yourself up to be a major midgame/endgame power. You can make up the research lost with the increased mage production from new forts. Using Calculus, you can get roughly 1226 RP from Year 1 to Year 2 with 2 forts turning out researchers and your Pretender (and assuming no researchers to begin with and you should have some mages available to be transitioned into research role by the end of year 1): enough to get you to Evo6 and Cons4, and that is discounting even more forts coming up and experience. With more forts, your research curve grows sharper, so it makes up for you research (or lack thereof) in year 1. The research you get in year 1 isn't significant anyway. If you devote your capital to nothing but research from turn 1, you get a graph of 6.1x (again discounting experience and new forts), of which the area is equal to 3.05x^2 and that means you end up with 439 RP. This is assuming you aren't turning out commanders for expansion. It's enough to get you to Cons4, but not even close to enough for Evo6, which is really more important than Cons4 (as it means access to Shadow Blast and Iron Blizzard).
Again, building up more forts means you can make up this gap in the long term.