I haven't tried 1v1 yet but the FFA is pretty good, even though I normally hate FFA formats. You're too busy managing your guys to do politics, and the games are so short that, if you lose early to a double attack, it's not too frustrating.
It feels like most of the FFA game is guessing where the generals are, which is mostly intuition.
A more teachable technique that helped me a lot is the following macro technique. Notice that if you're pulling an army off your general or a city, that army no longer benefits in size from the spawns from the general/city. So you want to delay moving out the army as long as you can. To gather up guys from your land tiles, collect them onto either the general/city or on the path that your general/city will take later. That way you can sweep them up as you move out and maximize the size of your offensive push.
For collecting guys from the land tiles efficiently, order your moves so that you don't move off of the same tile more than once. Reason being that the first move from the tile helps collect the natives from the tile, and later moves don't.
For timing an early offensive push, you want to start mustering your guys immediately after the 25 turn timer makes spawns in your land. By timing like this and gathering guys efficiently as described above, you improve your chance of winning an early battle.
