More nOOb questions

[76mm]

Hi, never played any civs before until I recently picked up Civ4. Won first few games easily at chieftain level, but have been crushed in several attempted games at noble level. I'm really confused about a few things:

1) I don't understand the scoring; even if I buy all of the cultural items, have thousands of gold pieces, etc., I am dead last among the civs? What am I supposed to do for points?

2) Even though I am continually building things and advancing technology, I often have thousands of gold pieces--a few times I have been declared richest in the game even while I am in last place. What should I be spending my gold on?

3) It seems like I do not get to see technologies that I should be able to choose according to the tech tree. In particular, I never see rifling until well into the 20th century. I thus get crushed by everyone that has rifles--it is ridiculous. I seem to have plenty of money, so why am I not seeing these key techs?

4) What's the reasoning behind this forum's requirement to wait 180 seconds between searches? I've never seen a forum with that policy and it is extremely irritating.

76mm

[Astax]

You can tell the breakdown of the score by hovering the cursor over your score if you have the score display runed on. Most of the score comes from your land and population.

[Tunguska]

Try to keep up with the AI technolgy wise.
Choose a path to research F6 lets you plan ahead in stead of choosing a new tech out of the pop-up after reasearching one.

It is not so important to have lot's of gold, you can use it for upgrading your old units and rushing production (with the wright tech) or to buy tech or maps etc from the other players.