[Fantomen]

Ideally, a strategy that enables good expansion can also be tweaked on the spot to make a strong first war. It's not quite the same of course, but a bunch of effective expansion parties can often be turned into early game armies when stacked and combined with a few mages, or one by one as raiders.

You should have a research plan that gives you a few key spells against rushes early on, and think about how to tweak that plan depending on the nature of the rush in question.

A "your first war" guide is hard to write, because the actual strategies would be different for each nation. It might be possible to make general outlines for fighting different types of opponents and rushes though. Sort of: this is how to counter giant E/N sacreds, this is how to deal with large amounts of troops, this is hoe to counter elephants etc. But searching the fora will give you a lot of such threads already. Maybe it would be an idea to collect all early game advice into a sort of general early game guide. Lots of work though...

Honestly, fighting your first war is like fighting any war. Game specific knowledge only takes you so far, because the basic skill is strategic thinking in general. Setting up traps, making diversions, lying convincingly, playing dirty. Sun Tzu for the win. I've run into a lot of "newbs" that I could beat on a dom3 knowledge basis, but that turned out to be crazy tough opponents anyway because they were anything but newbs on strategy games and knew how strategy works.