Thanks for the advise so far. It seems I'm having really bad luck on Temperate worlds, by getting wide expanses of grasslands, deserts and plains to start. Without nearby forests, chop-rushing anything isn't viable.
One of the other things I'm seeing with Epic scale that appears to be a bug is that the years start clocking at 20 years a turn, then it slips to 25 years a turn somewhere between 2500BC and 1500BC (when I noticed it).
I've assumed the barracks was my time problem. The barracks costs 90 hammers, and the build time is:
90 turns / 1800 years at 1 total hammer production (THP),
45 turns / 900 years at 2 THP,
30 turns / 600 years at 3 THP,
23 turns / 460 years at 4 THP.
I haven't had many, if any starting cities with 4 or more hammers. Many times, I can only achieve 2 THP at the start of the game, no matter how I distribute the production. This is particularly true in a plains environment (1 food, 1 hammer).
Walkerjks, I have tried throwing workers in the mix at various points, but it has seemed to slow me down more than not, unless I get a lot of 'development' technology advances from tribes. I was hoping someone was going to talk me out of the barracks, I guess, so I didn't mention the worker. Besides, workers don't seem to have many very early options to increase hammers.
It seems prudent to restart the game if you start if there's fewer than 4 forest tiles for the home city, but that forces the game to revolve around the Random Number Generator in the Map generation, and somehow, that doesn't seem right. There should be another startup strategy to deal with low-THP situation.