I wasn't planning on naming my pretender after a kohan. Feel free to dork it up tho!
@Niarg - My noob opinion for start is to try to take control of all provinces your capital borders asap to maximize income. Of course if there are a couple of really strong indies it'd be better to take less defended provinces further out than to waste troops.
Pretender choice can also make a big difference. For example I was originally going to pick a certain pretender and play to it's strengths. For fun I tried another pretender, which I thought was inferior, and have come up with an almost entirely different strategy based on it's strengths.