Early methods to increase productivity without killing your population?

Any early methods (during the Ancient Age) to increase productivity without killing your population?

Resaerch:
Mining, Bronze working, then required only neccessary worker (hunting, husbandry, wheel, farming, pottery), military (archery, possibly iron working) or religious techs. The reason for or is that you want to research metal casing ASAP, chop or poprush forges in all your cities, employ engineers. Next step is organized religion or theocracy (25% for buildings or units). I usually find organised religion best.

Theology doesn't boost unit production, just adds experience.

Chop forests.

Organized religion is the way to go.

The only problem I have with chopping forests is if you do it too much you'll end up having a barren landscape that will make big, but unproductive cities. Unless you're surrounded by hills, don't chop too much.

You don't want a 'mesopotamia' condition, right? That's where your civilization gets a boast by quickly clearing your landscape of forests to add production, and then afterward being left with barren and useless land. This is why ancient mesopotamia got such a quick lead so early in history, yet so quickly fell behind.

(I've had this happen to me before and lost the game by the middle ages because I chopped everything.)

If it's multiplayer, by the time your cities will grow to utilize those forrests or require health, game will have been decided.

Otherwise, leave plains forrests and leave 3 or 5 forrests per city for health. Chop outside of fat cross radius of planned cities, if you plan to establish city in forrest square, chop it before sending settler.

Also I found chopping team is highly effective:
- city workers need to improve city, you can chop a forrest while building improvement
- the chopping team will chop outside your borders and givey you hammers, it should consist of 2 workers - chops in 1 turn - and 1 archer, on higher difficulties or latter 2 archers or archer and axemen or archer and spearmen. It's better to have 2 workers in pair as you need to protect workers outside your cultural borders or on far edges of empire and you need same amount of units for 2 workers as for 1.

I agree witht he multiplayer being over soon. But I do tend to leave 2 forests on plains in multiplayer if I have no other production tile in the radius. Since usualy you wait for metal casting in multiplayer, goign for construction instead, you wont have enough production to make the city be worth anything :/

Chop can be overused, but at the same time, it is devastatingly good for the early rush or a quick expand if necessary.

Also it is not a good idea of chopping trees outside of your flat cross, since you would probably build cities there, ad it would be much better if you use your ressoruces to these new cities.