well if you playeda few games within a few hours thats your problem.. Go until your dead.
Start on settler difficulty.
As soon as you start on the map, put your settler down form the city, then, build a worker. Once workers built build a warrior or scout, and then vice versa, after that Settler. Once you have the second City have the capital build a wonder, have the secodn city build a worker, warrior, then improvement, then settler then wonder, and from there what ever. Always keep strong culture and military, and stay at pace or ahead in techs. I don't go threw and specialize cities, hell I'm guessing thats fooling with the citizens and increasign preists and such, i dont bother with that take otu my fun lol. Make sure you build atleast 2 farms for cities that are going to be larger(so your first 5) gain all resources around them, and then spam cottages. Cottages make lots of money. More money you got the easier it is to play the game, however the more money you got the mroe demands other nations make. Sometimes when I'm not as strong as I'd like to be, and I have neighbors I push more into culture, science, or espionage rather than make the little extra money, so they can't demand it. Until I build my forces up to a good level, then. I don't care if i make alot of money, they demand, I deny, they declare, I destroy. Usually when I do this, my economy rebounds anyway, and I end up making a similar amount of money as i did before I raised the scale up. Sometimes a downward economy comes back stronger. I played as brennus before, and I was making 100+ gold per a turn, then for some reason my economy crashed and i was at -200 per a turn. Bu I believe this was because I had deals with other countries 30 or 50 gold per a turn for cow and suddenly they canceled the deal because they were making 5 gold less than what our agreement was for. So I fell into a downward spiral, because they wouldnt share their wealth lol. So. I changed the Civics to my favorite ones(I went communist

) and my economy rebounded to 100+gold, but I had lowered scale, I decided to raise the scale til I was breaking even again, then I started trading with the other nations again, gaining insane gold for crappy resources lol, Eventually I was at 100% making 500+per a turn with 400 from trade. I knew If I lost the trades I'd hit recession again, So instead, I took over my neighbor. My economy lowered to 300+ per turn, then after the war, I pumped the conquered side up with workers, built infrastructure and improvements, built lots of Courthouses and Malls(Brennus of America

) with banks. By the time the reconstruction period ended, I was making 1250 Gold per a turn with 60% science, 20% Culture and 10% espionage. I was only playing I think Warlord or Nobel, so it wasn't that bad. But When economy rebounds it's good

some games I had to go completely bankrupt before I could make money again, some I had 30,000 gold, and went through a 0% free fall until I hit 0. Then, Economy started growing at first slow, but then it sped up and I'd end up with 40k to 70k saved up.