I've been playing a lot of both Six Ages games lately. My thoughts on the various:
You always want to start the game by builiding food shirnes and getting trade routes to their limit. It's simply the best. Get Busenari/Uralda calf blessing and Voriof/Uryarda lamb/kid blessings to double your herds.
If you get enough war blessings, you can win battles by whopping twice. Morale blessing and Firearrow should suffice. Intimidate>Skirmish>Intimidate and most human enemies will run away. It's bad for offensive raids, because you get less loot than with charging, but allows you to minimize casualties.
Stick to the cattle raids before getting war blessings and ~25 swords. Use Raven blessing to remain unseen.
If someone fears you, you can demand a tribute from them even without raiding. The best source of tribute is when your enemy comes to you and offers you twenty cows. You can then demand annual tribute and it's a lot of wealth.
Trickster and Shaman advisors are supremely useful. Skilled Shaman allows you to call on sprites without expending magic, common option in many situations, Trickster delivers more magic.
Magic is perhaps the most important resource in the game, measures, choices and treasures that grant magic are the best in the game. Solar Mask of Yelm from Elempur is extremely useful, since it allows you to constantly heroquest. Bowl of Unity and Tablet of Hyalor are also very good, both grant +1 magic during Sacred Time in their respective games.
In the final heroquest of the first game, you can also unlock the blessing of Unity/pledge of the Elmal's shield, which grants you magic when you get along with foreigners in the second game. It might be the best blessing from that final heroquest, although I haven't tested them all. There's antiChaos blessing, but I thought it wasn't that great. Others are generally more situational.
I like to choose Rams as my ancient enemy in the first game, it's a good source of mood and magic bonuses.