When I played my first game of Old World in beta, I put it at middle difficulty, coming off high-ish difficulties in other 4x, and it was a pretty fun learning experience. A war happened that I wasn’t prepared for but managed to crank out enough units to turn the tide. All my families hated me by the time the mid/endgame started closing in but that’s not too big of deal.
I’d say in lower difficulty play, for learning the game, it is probably best to get a worker in each city and then produce military units (and settlers when needed). You’ll learn how to produce units more quickly as you play, but cranking them out in 6-8 turns this game is fast enough to defend yourself and set you up to conquer some neighboring tribes and then empires. Expect a lot of casualties and to train replacements.
This way, anything you figure out as you play you can try putting to work and seeing what it does, and you can learn how the combat system works.
Science is pretty slow, and I’d prioritize new unit techs, since it is easier to predict how those will help you. There are some opportunities to get free unique units (like Greek hoplites) as cheap bonus research options, but I’d not worry about producing them in your first game. (You need the sovereignty tech, then to get a city culture to the second level, “developing”, so that you can build a stronghold, but this requires putting a lot of game elements together.)
Hope you have a great first experience. I have the most fun when I roll with the punches and try to enjoy the setbacks.
