Begin using the campaign for the first time through. It's basically set up as a tutorial.

The traits are something you will have to experiment with. I know that new players to any game or the genre in general have a play style that works best for them. To advance to multiplayer or higher difficulties will depend on your ability to vary your playstyle to new situations that develop. I don't know if there are any play vids on youtube for elemental but you might look for some if you are running into trouble consistently.

There is lots of strategy posted on the boards as well. Just play the way you have fun, but start with the campaign is my recommendation.

Thanks for the advice guys...  I ended up playing the campaign, which was pretty cool but seemed a bit short and not quite as informative as I expected...  I hear this is being remedied though...

Starting a new game today now that I have a slightly better handle on the mechanics...  The town building in the campaign seemed quite limited, as my cities were fairly capped out early in the game but I assume this will be fixed when I get to play around with technologies...

Unfortunately, the manual supplied with the game is completely insufficient (grade D-). The manual that Gwab made

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/954860-elemental-war-of-magic/faqs/61009

is much better and actually covers most of the game stuff you need to know.

This is one of those games that you need to participate in the forums to get answers you want, because the in-game user support (hiermennon, manual, and tutorial) are severly lacking.  

Any advice given now, based on versions prior to 1.1, are going to be superseded.. with that caveat startor, the way I played was to spam cities early, train at least a few peasants/observers in each settlment to prevent attacks, and avoid conflits with wildlife till there was enough goldozers to buy weapons and armor for my weakling of a sovereign.

In the unit design screen you can customize units & create different squads of different types. The stuff that's available to customize with is tied to other research, i.e. you need longbow tech to get longbows, also magical item tech is big as it allows a lot of good "buffs" that add to your squads, such as medical pack +1 health, +5 constitution or amulet of warding (+2 defense). Many of these magical items use up crystal, so making a beeline for crystal sites is important, as the endgame you want powerful squads that use a fair amount of crystal. Money isn't as important as crystal as money is easier to get in this game.

As far as champions/heroes, you need to go to the item shop to get stuff for these guys, or quests. Unfortunately, many of the quests are broken at the current time. I'm only able to go on maybe 40% of the goodie huts, which makes them mostly useless from my POV.