Tips

General:
My first game I made the mistake of uniformly building the buildings, I've found it's better to focus on increasing your population so you can gather more resources faster. Thus improving quicker.

For my crafting buildings, I chose the stone and leather upgrades, this let me outfit my heroes with full sets of equipment rather quickly.

You don't need food production for your whole population, once you have a full stock you only need enough to counter all the -1 food villagers.

Not sure how true this one is, but if I set 1/3 of my population to guards they can take on the random events without/with few losses.

Heroes:
Get a guard captain and champion as soon as feasible, especially important before expanding the map.

If you put a mender in your group you can benefit from sending in injured heroes, I spent my first 2 games waiting around for my heroes to fully restore before sending them out again, now with the mender I can safely send them nonstop into the first dungeon without fear of losing them.

Don't forget to hunt for companions for your beast tamer to replace his hawk.

You should get enough jp to buy all the skills for a hero's class by ~level 10 so that's a great time to switch them to a new class.