It depends on whether you're going bless or not. But as a rule of thumb, composite archers will form the bulk of your army. Starting tips tend to run the same for every nation actually. An excellent starting guide for beginners is found here :
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1
Or alternatively you can click my link on my sig for how I tend to play magic nations.
Essentially you'll be eyeing soft targets first in a ring around your capital so you can add more reinforcements to your expanding army every turn. Also make it a habit to recruit mages non stop. That is how you win the game, by having more mages than the other player. Try to not mix archers with fast non shielded infantry (for example, W5e's with the exception of the occasional decoy), because your archers will shoot them up if they engage in melee too much. Your meatshields are mostly for purpose as hold and shield to block troops from reaching your archer line. EA early-mid game is literally all about archers and blesses. Also I tend to take a solo expansion pretender, usually a dragon chassis to get even more of a jump start into expansion. Script it to fire closest x5 and attack closest and you'll be able to take out a majority of the regular indies. Later on you get nice summons to buff out the holes in your melee lineup, in the form of water demons, as well as using construction boosters to beef your mages. The flying celestial masters are really good evo casters but I get slightly annoyed at S&A being almost pigeonholed to taking growth 3 for any serious long term games. Also look into alteration 6 for frozen heart so your non cap mages can do something other than wank off. =\