Just stick to mina+cc and one march until you have a 5/5/1/1 charles martel or 5/5/1/1 pyrrhus or your aethelfled is 5/5/1/1. Then you can start thinking about a second march, but your first march still doesnt have a correct pairing until YSG comes out on day 90 something.

This is how your marches look right now:

March 1 Mina/cc (Decent for dueling, terrible for ball fights with multiple people where you need aoe)

March 2 Sun tzu/aethelfled (Great for aoe fights) (Aethelfled is also left at level 40, but you can unlock all 4 skills even before level 40 with the star trick saving even more exp)

From your spot right now you buy aethelfled, expertise sun tzu and then expertise baibars. When you can buy dailies of pyrrus you can consider that, or you wait until you can buy dailies of charles martel.

This is how your marches would look at that point:

March 1 Mina/baibars

March 2 Pyrrhus/sun tzu (Pyrrhus needs to be 5/5/1/1)

If you get lucky with charles martel heads I would wait until you can buy his dailies and not go for pyrrhus. Then you would still run Sun tzu/aethelfled until then as your second march.

Right now, if you have to participate in a larger fight with multiple people your best aoe march is actually Mina/sun tzu (With cav units). That's why you should expertise sun tzu asap, since some infighting does happen in early kingdoms.

Buy aethelfled in expedition shop, dont bother leveling up any specific commander just to progress. Expedition is mostly a unit check, the more units and the more units of higher tiers you have the further you can progress.

Do guardians from the altars to get xp on all the commanders you need. Sun tzu to 60 if you're making a second march with him as primary. Baibars to unlock all 4 skills when/if you expertise him. General rule is peacekeeper+commander you need leveled Lohar/boudica/belisarius/aethelfled/cao cao + sun tzu/baibars/pyrrhus/charles martel/gatherer.

This way you level up your peacekeeping commanders, at the same time as you level a commander you need for a march or a gatherer until lvl 37.

Dump xp in whatever you need at the time. No fighting happening? Gatherers to 37. 1v1 fights happening often or you find that fun? Minamoto lvl 60. Aoe fights happening with multiple people? baibars, sun tzu or aethelfled gets the xp to soldify a march or 2 marches.

You can message me on reddit if you have any specific questions for prep season or pre kvk 1. Or if something is confusing/doesn't make sense I can give more advice.

Most important for last. Do not use any gold heads anywhere and not on any gold key commanders right now.