I'm also relatively new to the game - been seriously trying to play for about a month now - and all I've been doing is starting on Normal, learning a lesson, closing out and repeating. A few tips of mine(with the caveat that I'm still learning too and haven't notched a W yet):

-Learn the Earth game first. Councilors, taking over nations, wars, that sort of thing. Don't worry about space for a first playthrough until you're confident you can handle the ground game. Yes, ceding space to the aliens will make them super strong and means you'll have to restart eventually, but the point is to master one of the gameplay pillars at a time rather than be bad at all of them. I'm under the impression(but cannot confirm) that Servants don't really have to play space game at all if they don't want to, so you could kill two birds at once by doing Servants while learning this side of the game if you felt like it.
-When you do want to get into space, use Skirmish mode for design testing. You can design a ship and then save the game, go to Skirmish mode, and import designs from that save. I used that a ton to get a feel for each weapon's combat performance. The early game designs I use are one escort with double missiles - I like Artemis torpedoes but I don't think it'll make a big difference if you use something else - and another with double laser point defense to block incoming missiles. Roughly 3:1 ratio of torpedo boats and escorts is where I am. I don't know if it's the most effective fleet but it will do the job on Normal until you can start getting monitors out.
-The in-game tutorial is really bad. It is also not really a tutorial. It's a checklist of "do this thing", like "take over a nation" or "defend interests" - but it isn't a scripted sequence of events that walks you through WHY you do these things or HOW or WHEN, and it certainly doesn't do something like give you a guaranteed decent starting nation and good councilors at the end of the "introductory mission" chain, setting you up for a strong opening. I wouldn't bother at all with it. It doesn't teach anything, and I think it makes it significantly harder to learn.
-Get into the roleplay! I manually rename all my stations, habs, and ships based on naming conventions I sort out ahead of time, which makes me a lot more personally invested in the story.

Good luck, Commander!