This guide will assume that you didn't choose anything that gave you starting money, because that drastically changes what options you have available to you this early on.
Turn 1:
Base Menu:
If you started without money, there's not a lot you can do at the moment but some interactions with your officers. Try to find ones that are easy going and strong and train with them through the interaction menu. You'll need the early stats as you start off pretty weak. You'll also want to set all your officers to labor jobs. It's a good idea to focus on Attack/Defense/Strategy first because you'll want everybody to be able to fight. Politics and the other stats are side bonuses you can worry about later. Politics can almost be ignored if you just plan to turn everybody into slaves as it's mostly used for persuading prisoners to join you peacefully outside of minor combat bonuses.
Governing Menu:
You'll have a bit of money from labor and things are cheap on the first turn. Use the training discount to raise the Attack/Def/Strategy of whoever you feel needs it most. The boost is a lot more apparent to people with low levels, so if you see a weakness in an otherwise strong character in one of those 3 aspects, focus on that.
Next up you'll probably want to buy a unit or two if you're able from Recruit. The first one has a major discount if under 7 stars, so try to buy the most expensive character you're interested in first. Your priority early game is to get a bunch of extra officers to increase your AP. The starting AP of 2 makes it pretty difficult to get anything done. Just remember to check their skills, aim for characters with a lot of tier 3 or better skills and unique skills you may be interested in learning for your hero. Don't worry too much about their overall strength/star rating. It's actually not that difficult to turn anybody into a decent fighter, especially if you grab them this early. Just try to spend as much money as you can buying units, they can all go into Labor next turn and pay back a lot of their cost.
Research targets I recommend this early are Fairy Support and Mutual Funds. The Combat and Taxation trees are probably the best to focus on early game. In order of priority, I'd say: Combat = Taxation > Defense > Conscription > Diplomacy > Employment (You'll soon be drowning in prisoners from fighting and this is almost useless).
Exploring can be dangerous when you're at war since there's a decent chance of the character being injured or losing a shit ton of money, but since war doesn't start for several turns still, it's fairly safe to try out.
Turn 2:
Base Menu:
If you managed to hire enough new officers, you might have 3 AP this turn. This is when some stuff can actually start happening. If you have enough money and are going for a lover focus with your officers, it's wise to pick up a comb right now from the shop. Otherwise just save for now. Remember to put your new units into Labor. This is when you really have to decide if you're going the mainly lover route or the slave route with a lot of your officers.
Slave Route: This is the time when you want to start throwing some officers in prison and training them. You can train 3 at a time, so throwing in 3/6 at a time is wise, leaving the spares out of prison for now to make money with Labor. It's best to train as many characters as you can into submission before war starts, it's much more difficult to not have your strongest Officers available for combat when war begins. For now, your best method of training is likely to just target each girl individually and lube her up with Rimjob, then target all the girls, and stick it in their butts repeatedly with "A Insert in turns". You really don't want a pregnancy this early.
Remember that some characters are impossible to train this early because of difficult traits like Stubborn, Prideful, Composed, Aloof, so watch out for those. Don't even bother trying to turn characters with multiple difficult traits like that into sex slaves yet unless/until you have the Lordly perk.
Love Route: Going the love route is just spamming interactions and trying to build favor with characters for now. Choose whether to lead or allow them to lead depending on their assertiveness. You won't have enough relation with most girls for physical contact just yet, so stick with training SLG skills and chatting.
Governing Menu:
Still not much you can do here yet. You want to make sure you have at least 5k at the end of this phase to be able to enter the arena next turn, so save up this turn.
Turn 3:
Base Menu:
Arena time if you managed to save up at least 5k like I mentioned. You desperately need this for your hero, it's a massive stat boost and even can be a decent gold gain. Pick an enemy that's at least 10-20 combat rating below you if you're not the savescumming type. The battles can be fairly rng, unless there's a weak officer here, you'll probably be stuck fighting a weak enemy (60) for now. Rape them if you don't mind being a bit naughty, it's just free sex experience and the unnamed enemies here can't get pregnant or have their relationship with you altered or anything like that. You'll probably make about 2-3k and get a few levels in all combat stats this early.
Continue training characters as you did before. If going the slave route, pick up the Blindfold and/or Rope from the shop, they're pretty decent submission gains and can be used on all 3 slaves in a single turn. If going the love route, you might want to start taking girls on dates and buying wine/booze to make physical contact stuff more likely to succeed. You can also save a bit of money to hire more girls from the Governing Menu if you don't yet have 3 AP, that should be a priority first. 3 AP is a huge boost. 4 AP is nice, but it takes quite a few more officers to achieve.
Punishment: You can skip punishment this turn if you're worried about the character's willpower. When you start with only half willpower this early, your slaves-to-be won't last long in training since they still hate being raped. It's up to you, there's not a lot else to spend AP on this early if going the pure slaver route though, building favor with whatever girls you still have outside of prison will be wasted when you imprison them afterall.
Training only 2 characters at a time allows you to finger them simultaneously, which drastically increases how long the training can last since it doesn't drop mood as badly as sex, it's something to consider and could actually end up being faster depending on the character's traits.
Governing Menu:
More of the same, buy some units if you can afford to, especially if you don't have 3 AP yet. Also you should have 3k in the treasury now, so buy a Laboratory building if your territory doesn't already have one. If it does, buy a Private Market.
Turn 4:
Base Menu:
Not much change here, just keep training your characters. At this point you can probably start with more physical interactions if going the love route. Slave route may also have some new characters to imprison. Remember to try to keep the slaves in your dungeons in multiples of 3 to not waste any AP/potential Exp.
Governing Menu:
Not much you can do here again, recruit if able. Though by now the cost is starting to scale up and it might be difficult to afford anybody from here if you've managed to pick up quite a few officers. It's still not too risky to go exploring, so have fun with that for now. Diplomacy might be enabled now, but it's still pretty pointless for now unless you have some characters with high sex skills to pleasure enemy leaders.
Turn 5:
Base Menu:
Again, more of the same. The love route probably hasn't changed too much, but in the slave route, you've probably started to have some characters submitting to you. Remember to "Demand Submission" from the characters that have submitted to you from the Other tab during sex training. It's a surprisingly easy skill check if the character is submitted to you. You can remove them from prison at this point. Branding gives Consent that allows those characters to use: "Give To", "Public Use", "Night Crawl", and "Sleep With", once they're released from prison.
"Sleep With" is probably the best perk of characters reaching Consent from a training standpoint. It allows you to train up to 8 characters at once and they don't have a Despair bar to worry about like while punishing them. This is where you want to train characters from Love to True Love or Submit to Slave to save a shit ton of AP and time.
Governing Menu:
You can probably afford another building now, probably go with a Market still. Might be too early to be worrying about training your low characters with buildings because your territory isn't too secure as small as it is now and you could lose those areas. Remember to have 5k saved for the Arena next turn.
Turn 6:
Base Menu:
More of the same, you've kind of got down your training routine and Arena fights down at this point. You might start to have some girls falling in love with you by now if you've been focusing on certain ones more. Remember to Confess to them during interactions (Before sex).
Governing Menu:
War begins next turn, you might actually want to save up your treasury points to buy more troops next turn if you're on a higher difficulty setting. If not, you can probably grab another income building.
Turn 7:
Base Menu:
War starts this turn when swapping to the Governing Menu, shit is about to get real. Hopefully you've been able to get several characters to Submit to you by now on the slave master route and you've released them from prison. You'll need at least 2-3 of your stronger Officers ready to form a war party next turn. If you've been following my advice, you should have at least 4-5 submitted by now. You could also have 4 AP by now which makes training characters much easier. Getting to 5 AP takes a while, so there's less rush to recruit new units at this point. Just worry more about training your current units, you'll capture plenty of enemies soon enough.
Before going to the Governing Menu, it's wise to look carefully through the skills of all your Officers and remove the problematic skills from them with the "Forget" tab in Skills if you have the money. Some have skills that are purely negative (Flandre's Insanity), or so have some that increase one attribute and decrease another that you may not want. You probably don't have the money for any decent skills for your Hero atm, don't worry too much about that. You really want to save up for the 100k ones (50k if high relationship with that character). On the plus side, you may be able to put your sex skills to use for diplomatic purposes on the Governing Menu if you've been training slaves. If your Hero isn't in a war party, they can bang the leaders of other factions for relation improvements with the Discussion option.
Also, if you manage to get 5 characters to submission/love, pick up the Lordly/Dependable trait on slave route, or Providence/Dependable on the love route. These will make boosting relationships much much easier.
Governing Menu:
There's a lot of new stuff to worry about. Diplomacy and maintaining alliances start to actually matter a bit, especially on higher difficulties. A sum up is that aggressive playstyles are much more difficult to use on higher difficulties. On normal, you don't need to worry too much and can get away with just about anything, but above that will require some thought before you even begin doing war shit, lol.
How aggressively you can play at the start also depends on how strong you are and how safe your early moves are. Try to avoid opening yourself up to more than 2 fronts at least in these early war turns (You can keep track of that with the City List). You'll often be converting your Treasury funds into Drafting as well. Converting your pocket money into Treasury is a move mostly saved for desperation once it gets up to x3 or higher multiplier, because the conversation rate is pretty terrible. Early on when it's 1-1 or 1-2 ratio it's not a bad deal. Time to go over the strategies to use here:
Full Turtle:
Full Turtle means you use a chokepoint on the map to make sure that you have no more than 1 front to enemy forces, then you proceed to do nothing, lol. It's placing all your best officers and troops in one garrison that has a high defense bonus (1.5x or higher recommended). and basically making it impossible for anybody to take that territory. The enemy ai isn't the smartest and will eventually throw themselves at you and die, you can then collect their officers and continue being passive until the next faction comes along and tries the same thing. This is by far the safest and easiest method of playing the game, but it can also be the most time consuming.
I think the best territories to start a game at for this are:
1: Gengetsu (Yellow - SE side)
2: Keiki Haniyasushin (Pale yellow - NE side after taking Animal from Saki Kurokoma)
3: Yumemi Okazaki (Pale Pink - SE side)
4: Tenshi (Blue - NW side): Although it has two openings, the one on their east side is fairly safe and you'll have plenty of warning of incoming threats.
Pros:
1: You're essentially unbeatable. Even with much less troops and weaker Officers than most factions, it's difficult for any faction to deal with such a condensed defense. The defense bonuses of some cities is absurd. Just remember that war parties don't benefit from the bonus, only units stationed in the garrison do.
2: You're extremely unlikely to lose any Officers or territories to enemy factions (Other than Special Factions).
3: Requires little or no effort on the strategy and diplomacy front (You shouldn't even need alliances).
4: Probably the most viable strategy for playing on super high difficulties.
5: Quickest Governing Phase, usually takes a minute or less.
Cons:
1: You'll have next to no income coming in from the Governing Phase and will likely quickly require additional income sources like pimping your officers out or lots of slaves in the brothel.
2: Passive gameplay, meaning it's likely to take much much longer to conquer the map.
3: Extremely slow Officer/Hero growth. The combination of poor income, and not having enough buildings to train your Officers will hurt.
4: Poor diplomacy bonuses, people will consider you weak for not owning many territories and will be less likely to go along with diplomacy checks.
5: Difficult to stop Special Factions since you can't move around the map easily and you don't have many troops. If an Officer you like is taken by one, you might have to just wait for them to be broken in and sold on the Slave Market to get them back.
6: Your solider limit will cap quickly and you won't get any natural regen from them. Any troop gains over 10-20k will cost money.
Partial Turtle:
Partial Turtle is the balance between the two extreme gameplay types. It's basically making sure you never have more than 1-2 fronts open to enemies while still trying to expand (Remember anybody you aren't allied with is an enemy), using careful planning of which areas you take and using permanent and temporary alliances all the time. You put all your forces on those 1-2 defensive areas and wait until enemies are weakened from attacking those areas to expand and deal with the rest of their territory.
Pros/Cons:
1: It's balanced, offering some safety of turtling and some of the income and diplomacy boosts of the other two strategies.
Aggressive Expansion:
The riskiest, and probably the most exciting method is just wildly trying to expand. Of course trying to hide behind choke points and ralleys as much as possible, though by turn 20-30 you're going to have a shit ton of openings anyways. This strategy is INCREDIBLY difficult to use on higher difficulties. Because you'll own more territories, you'll be seen as more of a threat and people might even ally against you. You'll have more pushing power in diplomacy and your income will be tremendous as well. Because you have more territory, you can use more training buildings for your weaker Officers as well. Permanent alliances are basically pointless here and you will make a lot of enemies. Because you're expanding so rapidly, it also means placing Officers and troops in garrisons is usually pointless outside of training, they'll quickly be left behind, meaning your defense bonuses of cities will often go to waste.
Pros:
1: Fastest gameplay and time to conquer the map.
2: Lots more income, it's a lot quicker to buy what you want from the Base Phase, which also helps with relationships and strengthening your units.
3: Better diplomacy scores, easier to make other factions do what you want.
4: Easiest to shut down Special Factions with. Often only requires a single alliance to reach the Special Faction base because of how much territory you own. You can also shove a shit ton more troops on the Officers you send there to beat them down instantly.
5: The only strategy that won't cap out on conscription limits quickly, so you'll still have natural troop recruitment instead of needing to buy any new troops you need.
Cons:
1: Riskiest gameplay by far. You will lose territories, you will lose Officers to enemy factions, you will often have to forcefully break apart your war parties (Putting them on a 3 turn cooldown) and abandon troops to survive and keep your Officers out of the hands of other factions.
2: Extremely difficult or impossible to use on the hardest difficulties. Spreading yourself thin when the whole world wants you dead is a bad play afterall.
3: Seems like you're more likely to be targeted by Special Factions the more you expand.
4: If you become a large threat, some factions may ally against you, this is when shit really hits the fan.
5: Governing turns take much longer, it may take 5-10 minutes to get through all the planning, defense, diplomacy shit every turn. There's basically never a chance to rest, every governing phase will require effort by mid game.
6: The game may end before you really get to play with a lot of the end game research/building stuff if you're super aggressive on easier difficulties.
In your first turns you'll probably be sticking with Full Turtle or Partial Turtle, you likely still don't have many powerful Officers, especially if you're training them into slaves. On lower difficulties you can form a war party with "Unit - Form Unit" and be a bit aggressive. You should probably only take 1 area this turn unless you need 2 to protect a relay or choke or something. On higher difficulty you'll probably want to place your strongest Officers in a building with 1.5x or higher defense modifier and shove all the troops you can buy into that garrison instead, then the waiting begins.
Remember how I mentioned you can fuck your way to diplomacy? Yeah, characters here don't mind banging each other for diplomatic favors I guess, even if they're rather shy. You get this from the Discussion option during diplomacy attempts with another nation. This causes a 1 turn cooldown on the character, but that refreshes on next turn, so it just means the character can't be placed in a building or used in a war party this turn. Sex will increase your relations and decrease hostility with the entire country depending on the skill of the character sent.
There's really no reason not to do it every turn as long as you have a spare sex able character (Hero by default can, or somebody with a Sex Knowledge of 3 or better like characters from the Sex Market). About the only thing you have to worry about is that whoever you send other than the Hero may take some relationship penalties with you. This is also considered a rather submissive act (Your character isn't leading during this). Keeping people happy when you can is wise. If people like you, they're less likely to conspire against you and join an alliance against you.
Turn 8+:
Base Menu:
Not too much left to talk about here. Keep training your units and such as usual. Try to save up for the tentacle book if you don't already have it, it greatly improves your ability to sex train characters and the magic doesn't hurt. Tentacle egging births also drastically improve your magic, though they do remove characters from defense/war parties because they count as regular births for that.
Eventually try to pick up the Engineer Trait (After Lordly, Dependable, Enchanting, if slave route) and research Hypnosis from the shop. Once trained (Recommended to train with 8 characters during Sleep With sex) it will make your life much easier all around when it comes to relationships and training.
When you have spare AP, use it to Sleep With as many characters as you can to try to train them from Love/Submit to True Love/Slave. Once your sex skills are good enough and you have tentacles, you can also pick up the Video Camera and start making money selling sex tapes. Even though you can make sex tapes a bit earlier, it's really best with 8 characters and tentacles, you can make 25k+ per AP. Hiring units from sex tapes is also usually a much better value than buying them or the money here late game if you need troops.
Once you have some Slave/True Love characters and money, you can start handing out big skills (50k+) to your Hero and favorite Officers. Your Officers don't get the relationship discounts and might have to stick with the level 3-4 skills, but your Hero should be able to get the level 5s. Don't neglect Capture skills, they can drastically improve how many enemy Officers you acquire in combat. It's also a good idea to give the characters you usually use in war parties skills to reduce fatigue as well or you'll have to disband them frequently to rest.
Governing Menu:
Let's talk about one of the last major threats here: Coalitions.
Coalitions against you are the fuck you in particular, game ending, death flag type of events. There's no easy solution to them, this is where your current troops are really tested. A bunch of enemies form an alliance against you and all decide to fuck up your life together. They hard focus you and try their best to wipe you off the face of the earth.
One of the worst things about this is that it fucks with your chokepoint strategies because all the enemies allied against you can move over eachother's territory instantly. What may have been a single weakness against a single faction can quickly turn into a fucking nightmare with enemies pouring in one after another through that small opening. Really the best thing you can try to do if you have enough territory is try to get as far away from your frontlines you can't defend and be prepare to turtle in high defense buildings/territories and lose a shit ton of territory until they're satisfied. Ceeding territory you're guaranteed to lose to factions you want to improve relations with is also wise. You can actually create a bit of a barrier with this by ceding territory to people not in the coalition against you and restricting the coalition's access to your territory.
There's really no way to fight these at higher difficulties early on. You may even have to escape your own territory to a different territory that isn't allied against you if possible to prevent being ganged up on. The only way to avoid a ton of losses is probably asking for ceasefires when able. Your goal during these is just survival of as many Officers as you can hold on to, try not to get greedy and think about expanding or protecting your territories. Even at normal difficulty, you may be surprised by how suddenly brutal things can get for you during this. They don't all strike turn 1, they usually take a few turns to prepare to shit on your life. I hope you manage to get a nice chokepoint with 1.5x defense modifier before one of these hits.
Coalitions against you seem much more common on higher difficulties btw, it's one of the first real slaps in the face you get from trying to move up the difficulty.
Random Notes:
1: When attempting an invasion, make sure you check the "Strongest enemy city defenders/field officers" information. A territory that seems really safe to attack may actually have sudden defenders on it. Notice above how it initially seems like the only defenders of that city are the 3100 troops. If you're wondering where an attack came from out of nowhere, it's usually this (Or an enemy allied against you). Basically the enemy can field units to defend last second just like you can.
