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Just so you know my background in the game a bit, speaking from experience. My micro is not 'pro' level and at that point of play a split-second click on the unit you need especially in combat makes all the difference in winning or losing even battles where you have a significant numbers advantage, plus there is just no satisfaction for me in the multiplayer when there are other RTS that are a bit more forgiving which I would rather play multiplayer (Warcraft 3 TFT is still probably the best fantasy RTS with the right level of unit control, strategic choice, and client responsiveness, IMO- that game has not seen a real rival since and it's been 20 years... this game however is close).
I will give 5 tips that I think are of extreme importance to your early game, things I learned again through experience, talking to other players here and in-game, and watching YouTubes of top level play. They are all important and each game is different--even matches against AI opponents such as in Conquest--so don't consider these as ranked in importance as much as 5 things you should prioritize at the beginning of any match:
1. Scouting- my usual build is to only make the scout camp, and scout with 2 scouts right away, at least all of the adjacent tiles, before building or moving anything else. To have all of the tiles scouted up to where you cannot scout anymore, i.e. you need an upgraded camp to scout further because you have discovered the AI positions, allows you to make a plan on what to do from there. That said, I usually pull one of the scouts back off to just gather food or build as soon as I see my adjacent tiles, and allow the remaining one to continue scouting until he can't scout anymore. Scouting out dead-ends... areas of the map that have only one way in or out and you know this by looking at the map... is optional, and sometimes I won't do it to have the scout just come back and gather food instead. If you can help it, have a wounded villager do your scouting, and die doing it, even if this means pulling back a full-health scout and replacing him with say a villager that has just been half-eaten by wolves. It's always more worth it to lose a wounded villager through scouting than have a half-dead villager gathering food (there is a wounded penalty to their production, which isn't as much of an impact if they are scouting instead).
2. Wood- again, this is sort of obvious but, a woodcutter lodge on a forest gets a bonus, so holding off to build your woodcutter lodge on a forest tile instead of your home-tile gives you that bonus the rest of the game. At the very beginning, you just don't want to get in a situation where you can't get wood at all. The woodcutter lodge takes the longest time to build of the initial buildings you need, which is why sometimes it is built first right after the scouting camp... so it finishes faster and you start getting wood sooner. It's sort of a matter of taste, I just prefer to see if I can instead make it on a forest tile. You *can* even hold off building the woodcutter lodge until even later if you see that you have a shipwreck you can salvage or the vines-tile nearby that you can salvage, using that wood to make the woodcutter lodge... you might do this so you can make some other buildings first. These are rare instances, but depending on the tiles you are expanding towards this can be an option. Like I said though, don't cut it too close- always keep in mind you can't go under 50 wood before you build it, and it's a pretty essential building at that point, as essential as your town hall more or less for your continued survival.
3. Lore- this is the less obvious of these five things, but I can't stress enough how important it is to get at least one villager gathering lore, as soon as possible. Lore income comes in depending on your population size (you gain more lore passively the larger your population is) and then also through the other active means that it is gained: a loremaster at a stone, an active ship with sailors gathering lore/krowns, and the bonus lore you get from some actions (healing the bird, exploring ruins, colonizing certain tiles). Since at the beginning your population is low, your Lore income will be like +1 or +2... this makes it take forever (relatively speaking) to get to even your first lore unlock. Having just the one loremaster going ASAP will halve the time it takes to get there... and to get to the next one, and the next one, and so on. Now, some clans have other ways to gain lore (Boar, has those Menders, for example)... these count towards this point. If there isn't a lore-stone on one of your first tiles you expand into you need to have a ship going to gain lore, or exploring going on to gain lore, until you do get a tile with a lore-stone... and then use it. Prioritize having just this one lore-keeper going all the time, even in emergencies. It may seem in the short-term that it helps more to have that extra food or wood, or that extra military unit, because it is such a slow return, but it compounds over the course of the entire match if you just keep them on it... even better if you can afford to have more than one. No matter which victory condition you are going towards, having the extra lores unlocked help ALL of the victory conditions (not just the Wisdom condition).
4. Food- So, prioritizing food as in having tiles that produce food for you over and above just villagers gathering roots and berries, drives so much in your early game that it is hard to say which of these things I have mentioned so far is the most important. There is a real argument to say that the most important thing is food, and just worry about food and everything else will fall into place. This is kinda true- if you had to choose between a forest tile, a tile with a lore-stone on it, or a tile that has 3 building slots and 2 food sources on it (fish and deer, grain and fish... you see these sometimes)... the double-food tile is probably the most valuable. Having all three of those tiles and exploiting them to their fullest extent, even better. But having a strong food income right away, and then continuing with having food income be your priority, especially when the minimum needs of wood and lore are met, is a good path to follow. Always build on your food income. There are of course exceptions, especially considering certain clans have a 'special' food mechanic (Wolf can exploit wolves and bears for food, for example), but a really good general assumption is that if you have a ton of extra food, you have the option of feasts, unhampered expansion, you can trade it (giants love food), you can go periods where nobody is gathering food for whatever reason and just live off your stored food, and blizzards are not nearly as scary if when going into one you are sitting on 1000 food. Plus there's a happiness bonus you get for every 500 food stockpiled. Know that there is a little bit of a bonus for grain during the summer (farms produce a *little* more food than the other food sources in the summer) and fish, while it seems like fish make the least amount of food, because fish doesn't have a penalty in winter a fishery ends up making about as much food anyway and you don't have the swingy-ness in your food stocks when you have fisheries, so I don't really prioritize one over the other, they are all good.
5. Krowns- I know this sounds sooo obvious, and it is, but something to keep in mind at the beginning of the match, EVERY match... there is a sweet spot in your building progress where you have built a few buildings, but your krowns income is still at least +1. Think about how you can stay at that spot for awhile if you need to, and when you are going past that spot (building more buildings, or upgrading buildings) make sure you have some means to make krowns. Whatever that means is going to be, right about then is when it becomes a priority, more so than it is before that point. Between ships and trading posts, generally in my opinion its okay to have both, or transition from having a ship in the beginning to having a trading post/market (on the same tile for the compounded upgrade bonuses) later on. Some clans (raven especially) you do just as well making 2-3 ships and forgoing trading posts entirely, but nowadays with the extra neutral factions and events that rely on trading, it is such a good way to gain krowns and other goodies just through trading. Also, (again obvious but needs to be said) if you know you are going to have a surplus of something e.g. you have multiple forest tiles in your initial tile layout so you know you have the potential of having a lot of wood, setting up early so you can trade it is a good idea, because why not? It's easy krowns, and there are multiple ways to buff up your merchants so they are making even more krowns. And krowns can ultimately be turned into all of the other resources through the marketplace if needed, a utility that can again be buffed through lore with most clans. Krowns don't go bad (neither does wood...), about the only bad part of having a huge stockpile of krowns would be not having a way to spend it (as the saying goes, it can't buy happiness and you can't take it with you when you die). But you will have something very important to spend it on: military. Your krowns stockpile is equal to the villagers you can quickly turn into military units when you need them and vice versa, limited by how many military buildings you built (and/or towers if you went with the defensive strategy/tactic).
I hope you find some of these tips and tricks helpful, and I would be extra happy to read some further discussion about any of the various points. A big reason I keep coming back to this game after so many years is because it is engaging (whether or not even the AI is too predictable or the game format seems frustrating sometimes given certain mechanics... it is as close to a perfect game in my opinion as far as engagement as other games I consider nearly perfect, the top of the pyramid for me is warcraft 3. Where warcraft 3 lacks in strategy/planning/economy but is better in the rock-paper-scissors combat, this game is better in the strategy/planning/economy aspect but I think lacks in the combat being a little wonky because it isn't very responsive) and it can be played as a thinking, strategy and planning game, and the procedural generation aspect of it makes it fresh over and over (also something lacking in warcraft 3, if I continue with that comparison).