Let's refresh this discussion a bit.
I looked at the game (got that spare moment finally) and we're not too far gone yet. Our tech rate sucks which would be a long-term problem if we let it stay like that, but if we can recover the economy and then apply a better war strategy than our immediate neighbors, we can maybe save this.
Let's look at the economy. First let's address the defecit part. 11gpt is going to unit costs and 45gpt to city maintenance. We can't do a whole lot about the unit costs if we want a strong enough military to take on our neighbors, but we can definitely improve the city maintenance. We need courthouses in the worst maintenance cities, and the forbidden palace if we haven't already built it.
Action items:
- Build courthouses asap, in the places where more than 2gpt will be saved
- Build FP if we don't already have it
- Look into what we need to do to get a higher units allowed level, if possible
Looking at the money supply side, we need a really strong commerce city. I only took a quick look, so don't know where we stand on this, but the way to do it is to pick the one with the most potential and cottage everything that we don't have to irrigate. If it has any hammer tiles that's a bonus but for this specialized city they aren't really needed. Then build all the commerce increasing buildings we can, and might as well build all the science buildings too. We might have to pop rush them if it's really hammer poor.
Address our military problem by assigning a small number of dedicated military build towns. Build forges there if we still need to (not all at once) and crank some hammers.
We'll probably adopt burerocracy (how the heck do you spell that anyway), so the focus for BW is a balance of hammers and commerce. Someone else already said that...
If we're going to pull this off, we need to focus every action of every turn on building ourselves up faster than our neighbors. We've got to give it our all if we want to succeed.