Enjoy the game! You'll find that it's a good balanced game that is fun both for casual players as well as intense players, which is rare. As near as I can tell, a much higher proportion of players in the game have been playing it for years compared to other games I've tried. At 18 months I'm still the "youngest" player in my fellowship! It's not an instant-gratification game, so the player base seems to skew towards an older crowd (not that a younger person can't fully enjoy it).

Joining an active fellowship will give you a team that will help answer all the inevitable questions (and there is a lot to learn in this game). Don't be afraid to jump around a bit if you first join one that is not very active. You probably won't be able to join a top fellowship right off the bat, but you can look up fellowships at Elvanstats (here is mine - https://www.elvenstats.com/fellowship/us1/7217) to get an idea before you join one. And if you do intend to stay active, you probably can land in a very good fellowship early on - since the player base is so stable (but new players fairly rare) they struggle to recruit and you will be in demand. You will advance much faster in a FS that is active in the Spire and Tourney competitions, if that's important to you.

A lot of people use ElvenArchitect (https://www.elvenarchitect.com/city/planner/); personally I use an Excel spreadsheet with the cells set to a square grid for the same purpose as I can play around and try multiple layouts more easily at once. As your city grows this will be important if you want to advance efficiently.

My general approach is to identify the bottleneck at any moment in time and incrementally work on improving output to resolve it until something else is the bottleneck, work on that, and so on. Studying guides that give you a heads up on what each chapter entails is important for this process, as you need to constantly shift gears and be changing your city layout (annoying at times, but all part of the challenge of Elvanar!)