I lurk alot and don't post much, but I just couldn't help myself this time. My friend and I have hit the same gold/happy wall and it has caused me to re-evaluate things. So I thought I'd share
One conclusion I've come to (and this may have been obvious to others) is that the early game has changed drastically due to expansion being tied to two factors now. Before, rate of expansion was all about happiness. You could increase your gold simply by planting a new city along a river or a decent coast and the number of cities you could throw down was limited by happiness.
By removing gold from coast and rivers it has added a second dimension to expansion. You can still throw down as many cities as you have happiness and not incur any gold loss, but now your development of those cities and the size of the army needed to protect them is tied to gold. You no longer get a free pass on the gold, it has to be thought out and managed.
That is the core idea that has been slapping me in the face when I tried to rush out and do what I've normally done.
The way I am currently tackling that is to play about a 100 turns and restart to keep trying different methods to see what is working best.
There appear to be two factors that greatly ease your difficulties. The first is being much more careful on your city placement. I used to build cities strategically to block other empires or hold important areas, or hell, just to make barbarians stay away from my higher developed cities. Now, my second and third cities are place with gold producing luxuries in mind even if I have to travel a little bit to get to it.
The second factor is of course the policies. Tradition has always been good for growing tall cities, but I've used it plenty of times for city spamming tactics. Now however I am finding that I rely on the Monarchy pick a lot and grow my starting city large even if I'm doing a spamming tactic.
I apologize if this sounds like I know what I'm doing, that's not the case, I'm just sharing what I've been thrashing around with in case it helps.
For the early game, I find getting a trade route up way more difficult than just building it and doing it. The reason of course is Gold. Unless you are lucky to have a trade opportunity close by you are going to have to protect it with stationed troops which cost money. You can NOT afford to build roads early on until your cities are big enough to offer income to offset it. That leaves you pulling money from luxuries.
My solution to help get a handle on this so I can learn more about the game is to Go with the Tradition tree and focus on building a large capital no matter what strategy you employ. You get a 1/2 off discount to unhappiness and a nice boost to gold and science. When you combine this with picking cities based off of nearby luxuries as a priority you can field an army and build some buildings in your cities without going into the poor house.
This I'm finding is buying me enough time to get to markets and properly establish a protected trade route or two.
If your problem is learning the early game like me, I highly suggest you try the Shoshone as your starting civ. They are masters of the early game and allow for a massive boost with every ruin you find. My choices were Culture for the first ruin, upgrade the pioneer to a Composite bowman with the second and then I focused on taking Faith whenever it became available and population for the starting city and then gold as the fall back.
In addition to that flexibility you get bonus defense for all troops in your territory and your starting cities have about double the starting culture squares allowing you to settle near luxuries and almost always have them in your border even if they are two or sometimes three hexes away.
I don't believe there is a more powerful early game civ than them and I feel it is the perfect civ to start learning with if you're finding the early game difficult due to this gold dynamic change like me.
- was chasing too many other wonders and tech choices. Did however get TOA and Hanging Gardens, plus belief for 1 food from temples.... capital is now size 20, with 22+food per turn.
