I took a quick look at your saves. I didn't spend hours analyzing them and I haven't created a detailed log of what I did, but I do have a few ideas. So here's what I see (all notes taken from the later save).
First, check your preferences. Turn on "Always Wait at End of Turn," "Build Previous Unit," and "Ask for Build Orders." These will help you maintain closer control over your imperial production. Before I discovered those settings, I used to get terribly frustrated when these little 2-shield-per-turn towns would try to build the Colossus (without my immediately noticing), and they'd set themselves on a project that would take centuries to complete!
Second, your cities are still too far apart. I'm guessing that you spread them out so far in an attempt to gain control of the luxes, but the result is that you've left some very valuable resources untouched. As an example, there's a cow 3 NW & 1 NE of Washington that nobody can use. Just because it's inside your cultural borders doesn't mean that it can be worked by a citizen. For that to happen, it must be inside the city radius. The total area that can ever, ever, ever be worked by a city looks like this:
uxxxu
xxxxx
xxCxx
xxxxx
uxxxu
Where C is the city, "u" is unreachable, and x is a workable tile. You'll often hear it called the "city radius" or the "fat cross." The cow that I mentioned is not within that area for any of your cities. Crank out a settler and go claim that cow.
Next, happiness: You're running something like 70% science and 20% lux. You've got at least two clowns in your cities. It is not necessary for every citizen to be happy. A city only riots when it has more unhappy citizens than happy. You can put all you entertainers back to work, turn lux down to 0% and science up to 100%. That'll get you Republic in 4.
You've got about 4 of your cities building wealth. In fact, you've got your best cities building wealth. (Truth be told, IIRC, I had done the exact same thing in the first game I ever posted here). If you fiddle with Washington's citizens, you'll discover that you can get 15 shields per turn out of Washington. That's a new swordsman every other turn. I switched Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and NY all from wealth to military builds. Even after all of the above changes, you're still only at -3 gpt, which shouldn't be a problem, as you've got over 300 gold. If you're concerned about gold, go see Korea. Try to trade them Philosophy for gold and see how much you can get out of them. I didn't try this, so I don't know what they'll offer, but they've got a bunch of gold.
The Military Advisor (F3) says you're "strong" compared to everyone. He also says that under despotism, you're allowed 28 units as your empire currently stands, and that you've only got 18. That means you can build another 10 units before you have to start paying unit support costs, even if you don't found another city. If you do, the number of allowable units goes up. If you switch to Republic now (or, rather, as soon as you get Rep), the number of allowable units will drop, & the unit support will go up.
Finally, your military units still aren't in stacks. You've got swordsmen sleeping here and there, but you've got about 6 swords. If you set your towns to military builds (swords, archers, etc.), by the time you get all of your current swords rounded up into one stack, you will probably have 8-10 swords and maybe a couple of archers or horses thrown in. Set the spears to defending the towns you've got and go use those offensive units to, well, be offensive.
Go teach Henry some manners! Once you get those units moving in a stack, you'll see that Henry's archers aren't so tough after all.
Edit: And I forgot to mention settlers. I know that it must sound like I don't want to build anything but military units. I don't. You've still got tons of space to expand before you really must go to war. You need to get more settlers out to establish more cities. Start mixing them in with military builds in cities that have food bonuses. You'd be surprised at how many more cites you'll be able to fit into your territory, even allowing them some room to grow, before you really run out of room.
Hope this has been of some help.
, but one step at a time. From the little experience that I have I don't feel like going for Monarchy unless it's absolutely necessary (ex: if you have no choice but to fight everybody all the time to get good resources).
I couldn't be fast enough so they ravaged two of my cities and, yes, I abandoned that game out of frustration. I haven't given up, and I will try again this weekend. But that was a pain in the ass.
