In terms of initial builds, the key there is to be flexible. You are eventually going to need many fogbusting units, a worker or two, and a couple of settlers. Obviously you want to avoid having workers sitting around with nothing to do and you want to avoid your cities working unimproved tiles for an extended period of time. I tend to do warrior then worker while researching to bronze working. Once that is in the worker will never be bored again and he can chop out a buddy and a settler while the city grows and produces warriors.
I think your desire to have a strong production base across all of your cities might be hampering your early game developement. I would suggest set up one very strong early game production center (in a perfect world I would prefer this not to be the capital because of its significant commerce bonus in the early game) to produce the bulk of your ancient army. Get a barracks running and start pumping units into the queue while using some queue manipulation to save yourself on upkeep if possible. This frees your other cities to develop infrastructure and commerce that would otherwise be impossible to do if they were all producing barracks and units. They can still contribute green troops to the war effort via whipping when necessary.
In terms of tech research, I tend to prefer a beeline to bronze working, followed by a beeline through appropriate worker techs to alphabet so I can backfill/extort techs. If I have an early marble source, I might consider a path to alphabet through poly/priesthood to make a run at the oracle after researching the needed worker techs (at a minimum probably animal husbandry and the wheel).
If you follow this type of path the first religion at which you would have a legitimate shot would be confucianism (a nice target for the oracle). If you miss out on that a lightbulb could give you taoism if you are really desperate. But taking a holy city is not so hard once you get catapults so long as any of your neighbors is nice enough to found a religion you can eventually get the benefits of owning a holy city. Waiting can also be nice because a very nice neighbor might even build the shrine for you which saves a great prophet for lightbulbing or other purposes.
