I'm facing a big problem with revolutions. No matter what I do, my second and third city always revolt and I lose them eventually. I tried giving them culture, got the early religion (in one of those cities), built early wonder (in one of those cities), and even started building the useless buildings like pellisads they had in the recommendations of revolution help box. Nothing helped. I'm not sure what am I doing wrong. Someone help please.
If you're more than four squares from your capital, the revolt chance goes up sharply. However, it is odd that a wonder didn't help. Normally a regular, great wonder does do a lot.
The way I fight revolts is money. Bribe early, bribe often. If you hurry, you should be able to get some trade caravans cashed in before you face an uprising. Don't get me wrong, it will be a bit of a struggle. But if you get a good cash flow going you should just barely stay ahead of the curve.
Also, building a wonder you plan to lose the race to (the caves or stonehenge are good ones). This gives you a better hammers-to-money ratio than disbanding military units. (note that settles don't yield anything for disbanding them, but workers do. so if you're at your pop cap for happiness, build workers and disband them if you don't have any more buildings to make and have enough of an army)(this might help you scrape up enough money for your first bribe.
Don't fuss about the premium the game charges for an early bribe. the penalty is worst at 5 turns or less. once you're in the 8-12 turn range, go for it. You should be able to stabilize the revolt thing with bribes till the size matures enough.
Of course, changing to charity asap is important too. as is having two unit (not single unit) garrisons (more than two doesn't seem to help?). As is heading for Senate and mercenaries or conscription.
Oh! another thing.
Small cities seem more vulnerable. See, this is what makes early game cities hard. You need to keep them small to deal with the new unhappiness penalty for distance from the capital. So you want to go through a fast burst from size 1 or 2 to 4 or 5 and then the revolt rate seems to settle down. My impression is the game offers a _big_ penalty for a high rate of growth. and your marginal rate of growth is highest for the smallest cities.
(if you can set up the terracotta army to go off as soon as you unlock enough happiness to grow, do that and then food caravan then up, maybe? I'll try that next game I do)
Also: build stuff like the forbidden palace or edinburgh castle or versailles if you can. In the old version, you wanted these wonders spread the hell out but now you actually seem to benefit by them strongly in much smaller spaces.