Congratulations, Julian, I think you will enjoy building this kit. She is indeed a very small vessel, sort of an Elizabethan destroyer.
The best advice I can give is to paint details like the decks, bulkheads, etc., beforehand, and to take your time doing it. Masking tape will help a lot. I'm glad your kit has crisp molding, since mine does not - in fact its sort of rubbery and rounded, which has made it challenging to get clean straight lines on the details.
I added strakes to the interior hull from Evergreen styrene strip, rebuilt the flat of the stern, and chose to model it with gunports closed, with two lids on each side are slightly open to ventilate the lower decks (use a styrene strip to prop the door and give it some surface to glue to). Use care in bending the stern gallery to the camber of the gallery sides, using a very low heat to soften the plastic just slightly. Prepare to sand the interior edges of the gallery deck on each side, since they will need adjusting to fit when the camber is set.
The one thing I've noticed with the design of the hull is that it looks very tall and almost top-heavy. To make her look more stable, I raised the waterline as far up as possible, above the dip in the lowest wale, and painted the wale just above the gunports black, to visually "lower" her a bit.
The model shows three levels of decorative triangles, which I have never seen in any contemporary image - two seems to be the limit. I opted not to decorate the lowest section at all, and sanded down the raised lines. Some support for this is in the Matthew Baker manuscripts, which show smaller ships as having decorations on the upperworks only. I also painted the stem black, again based on Baker, and did not paint the wales black except for the one above the gunports.
The big thing I'm curious about, is whether the keel is horizontal - it actually looks like it would be more at home with a slight angle down towards the stern. Does this sound like a logical thing to find in a ship of this type and era, or alternately, in the minds of the Airfix designers?
Jim