Hi Giddion,
Welcome to Dune wars.
You can improve your economy by:
a) Building and working cottages (particularly adjacent to wells; they benefit from fresh water supply)
b) Building harvester improvements on Spice tiles. These give you 3 gold per turn (either from your palace in version 1.7.1, or from a corporation founded when you build your Spice Corp HQ in version 1.7.0 or 1.7.2).
c) Avoid over-expansion until you get to Law of Arrakis, where you can build tribunals to reduce city maintenance costs.
d) Build Spice Refinery buildings, and then Build Bank, and trade-boosting buildings.
e) Use trader city specialists, or priest specialists and great priests, particularly combined with Meritocracy and Faufreluches civics.
In general, make sure that you choose civics to support your economy (or vice versa, choose your economy to support the civics you want, with a cottage economy or a specialist economy).
On techs; the tech tree has a signficant amount of flexibility, particularly regarding religion. If you're pursuing a mechanized strategy, you can skip a lot of the religious techs completely.
Other techs, while you can avoid them for some time you'll probably want to pick them up eventually.
The next version we release will have some tech tree changes, mostly at the high end, but a few earlier on.
