>>42318917
do what the other anons say and ignore the DLC
EAW plays basically identically to the base game so you don't need to play the base game first, you can just dive right into the Ponies, BUT Equestria itself is a difficult nation to play for beginners because you are going to get invaded very hard by a very strong nation (but it is insanely fun and if worst comes to worst you can get the communists to bail you out)
all you need to win is infantry with artillery in them (40 width, so in the infantry division designer fill the last column with artillery and then put everything else as infantry until the thing that says "Combat Width" is 40) and fighter planes and close air support planes
give your infantry recon, artillery, engineer and anti air support companies, you can mix in anti tank if you want but anti air kills most tanks and your close air support will take care of the rest

40 width infantry can survive against anything and with their artillery they can push against anything
the AI barely builds fighters or air bases so if you just build fighters you can very easily win the air war, and then with close air support you can buff your infantry so they just roll over everything and win every fight EZ
close air support can also murder boats so you don't need naval bombers, just build more close air support

if you fight an enemy you can't just push against, do one or both of two things:
>1. just let them attack you, defending is way stronger than attacking and this will wear down their units until they're weak enough that you can just walk over their divisions, the AI is retarded and will literally just send millions of its ponies to their deaths against your frontlines while you barely lose a few thousand. This is especially powerful with close air support
>2. (this one is more risky because you risk losing your units if things don't go well) move your units manually to cut off enemies on the map, walking behind them so the troops are no longer connected back to their capital. Troops that are encircled (see picrel) cannot be supplied or reinforced, so they just melt when attacked. This should go without saying but try not to let your own units get encircled, so when you try to encircle your enemies make sure to reinforce the flanks of the units that are pushing into enemy lines to encircle them.

Other things to keep in mind:
As soon as possible, upgrade your Economy Law. Certain countries may take a while to do this, but you want to mobilize your economy to Partial Mobilization and then War Economy as soon as possible because it massively buffs your factory output, eg how many guns you can make and how quickly you can build new factories to make new guns with.
On the topic of factories, for most nations you want to focus on building Civilian Factories for the first few years, then after about 2 or 3 years start building Military Factories instead - Civilian Factories build other factories, Military Factories make guns