Help me become a rich mofo! :)

Well yeah it's not something for higher difficulties because you have to optimize everything.
But it does what he asked for.

I had 5 original cities and another 5 annexed cities. Had about 1 military unit in every city and no military units outside. Combined with nice trade I had an easy 150GPT and 5000 reserve gold.
I played defensive and boosted my tech so my army was still bigger than that of my enemies so nobody dared attacking me. In the odd case I did had to go to war my GPT would easily drop back to 40.
Though I think it only gained me about 30GPT to have my armies upkeep go down by garrisoning. Most of the income was from trade. Had about 7 ivory and 7 furs available in my empire for trade.

If only you could buy policies with all this gold.

Thanks for all the advice. I started a new game on archipelago map. Luckily I started out with a capital with four water resources and managed to build the colossus that gave me a pretty good start. I will try to take all advice into consideration throughout the game...

Archipelago map often justifies taking Commerce tree.

Four water resources is an awesome start. Welcome to the good life if you managed to build Colossus on that kind of start.

Pilgrim is right - that kind of game/map can make commerce pay off big time.

Rpger29 said:

Four water resources is an awesome start. Welcome to the good life if you managed to build Colossus on that kind of start.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't go as far as calling it awesome. It's a slow one anyway. But they all are on water heavy maps. You need lots of cash to rush buy lighthouse/harbor/seaport/4 boats.
Hard building all of these with zeroish production is beyond painful. So Colossus obviously helps. Another positive thing - on archipelago everybody starts slow. On bigger landmasses sea resources start puts you in disadvantage from a get go. Not a game breaker, but it's definitely an obstacle.

Water resource starts are not the best, but yeah they can turn into very powerful cities by the mid game. If you have multiple sea resources buy the first work boat, connect the resource, sell it straight away and buy another boat, repeat until all the resources are hooked up.

For anyone with knowledge about gold,

Is it better to have few tall cities or wide spread out cities?

I know the obvious differences but any experiences here?

From pure income point of view usually wide is better. Wide + puppets is the best.

Less cities : Less wars, more RAs.
More cities : More wars, less RAs.