Alright I will try to help you further, but this is the kind of thing that your chief should know and pass on.
First the only people that know why there isnt the kind of tutorial that you need is Plarium.
You start off the game with a hero and nothing else, apart from some buildings, the tutorial forces you to do certain things in the hope that you will learn enough to continue without further help.
The hero can do everything with or without armour , except collect resources, scout and banish ghosts, pardon me if I have forgotten anything else he cant do.
Getting armour for him effectively makes him do things better or faster and improves other aspects of the game.If you look at the forge and then find the equipment page it lists 5 types of equipment,
Helmet, Armour, Weapon ,Boots and Amulets ( you can have 2 of these), You need all of them.
What you make depends on what materials you have ,what level your hero is, and what you want to do most.
The next choice you need to make is,do I make the basic equipment and then upgrade it, or do it wait till I can get the best, or settle for something in the middle.
There are six classes of both materials , gems and equipment, Simple, Usual, Unusual, Rare, Epic and Legendary.
You can combine all the lower classes of materials and gems until you get to legendary, but it takes a lot of time as you need 1024 pieces of simple to make one legendary item.
If you look at the equipment page it tells you the level at which the item can be worn by the hero, so you wont have need of anything at the top of the page for a time, to be exact, when your hero is level 50, which is the main goal, at hero 50 he can wear anything (presently)
Apart from the materials you also need lots of silver, which is also a limiting factor to what you can afford to make.
Under the picture of the equipment is a list of benefits that that piece of equipment gives,
Two of the best choices you can make is to forge armour that helps you build faster and learn faster( knowledge in th oracle, the sparkly building in town)
.For some the benefit is more obvious than others for example , if it says food production it helps you make more food.
The rest are a bit more complicated as they tell you the benefits they give to all of your troops(soldiers) or just to a particular kind, there are 5 types of troops, melee, cavalry (Riders),ranged(Archers) ,killer, and siege(Catapults), 3 are more obviously named than the other 2 which are somewhat similar but hard to define, melee just means lots.
So you also have to decide what soldiers you want,or if at all ,to specialise in, and get the equipment accordingly.example if you dont have archers then you might not need (Ranged) equipment that helps them.
When and if choosing specialist troops, remember that cavalry are the fastest,then killers,archers,melee and siege,this is roughly the same order for how much resources they can carry, except archers carry more than killers.
This covers the basics,later and consecutively, you need to think about equipment made from the specilast materials that the invaders drop,some invdaers are more useful than others,but is dependant on other choices you make.
Yes I will be adding the north gear to the list too as hopefully all players will be able to get it soon at least I hope they will, Great idea about the other rss I have accounts that hyper farm all the different rss so it is very useful to know, The lynx and saracen gear are still the best invader gear for attacking and defending with and they work for all troop types including scouts but there are still some pretty good standard equipment for different troop types which I was using myself before I got the lynx and saracen gear, I still use lynx gear for traps in my town as it covers all the troops but for attack and tile traps I use killer special gear. 
