I ended up playing this mostly via the stored up offline time (The max you can store at one go is 24 hours which takes around 28 hours ish in real life time, then you need to login and quit the game again for it to hit the max of 48 hours).

It is a great game where you can explore and play in your own way.
Thus in my own way I ended up having my own goals of playing this (despite not being very efficient)

Goal: To progress stably without much lost perception till the next break point (like your first layer prestige or the first ascension) before slowly building back up again while if possible still working towards something permanent.

So I read some of the guides but they are all for efficiency and speed. Usually people like me aren't that optimised and following the guide fully would end up making me feeling some sense of lost.
So the first point I can recall recently is this:

First Ascension.
Instead of queueing the speed run prior to that first ascension point ascension, I recommend queueing some other trials instead despite the guide saying that they are harder (they are, but at least you are starting off somewhere when you are playing slowly instead of being bound by the 20 hours time limit in speed run).
Since I made that mistake, my entire gameplay felt like a sham since almost everything is reset except armoury, and I have to build back up to ascension second point in order to set the trial thingy back to one of those non timer limited ones.

Summary - First ascension trial prior to ascension, choose those without time limits since slow players won't be able to clear that speed run on the first run.