How to avoid money shortage in early game time???

I disagree that Honor & Liberty are bad early policy trees. Honor can be good to find those barb camps that pay for your troops, & gives you several culture for killing them. I'll agree that often I open with Tradition, but maybe only go deeper into it about 50% of games. Oligarchy, though, is good to grab, especially if you want larger armies.

In my most recent game playing as Romans, I started doing heavy conquest early on, & I found that deficits don't seem to be the game killer that I thought they were. In fact, I had nothing but deficits until about turn 200, and for about 100 of those turns my treasury was completely bankrupt. It didn't seem to cause my units to disband like I thought, nor did I loose any buildings, and I didn't notice any penalties to combat strength (although I might not have noticed since I also had -10 to -15 happiness too for a lot of that time).

Anyways, to make a long story short, even though it was tough with all the rebels spawning every few turns, and the science hit because of the deficit (plus several wars with Greece, Assyria & Japan), I managed to get things back on track by about turn 250, even after conquering several cities (I had about 8 or nine by that point). In fact, I think my early conquests are what helped me bring my science up later on after I connected them all with roads & built them up some, as I think I was 1st to get to industrial age with Mil Trad, and getting Brandenburg. Currently I'm #2 in score & tech (only because Germany is halfway around the world & also expanding aggressively), though this is on prince level, so maybe my lessons don't apply the same on harder levels.
 
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