I'm not sure I'd count as a newbie for this kind of game. I do enjoy killing AIs, but I'm still not sure I should take someone else's slot. I do think that on the whole this is probably the least interesting of the options you proposed, and arguably the most work, so I'd keep that in mind.
I agree with most of what's been posted so far in the thread. You want to set independent strength to 3 or 4, you want to use Better Independents (you may even consider modding nations to make their crap troops too expensive or resource-intensive to build, but that would be a *lot* of work), EA