You can build a merchant as soon as you have some materials.

Game is playable again!

Win!

There's always gold to be taken from huts, so its kind of a moot point. 

First thing I do is build a workshop..

Yes, but the net effect is to slow down the early game a lot, and there's nothing gained out of it.

Providing revenue from the initial city would solve the problem, wouldn't unablance anything (you can even restrict it to the capital if you're afraid of city spam side effects) and speed up the early game a little.

I'd have to say I'm in favor of this as well... a small bonus to your capital city, maybe 1 or 2 gold per turn. Just to kick-start the first ten minutes of the game. Adventure and such should still be a huge part, and will be.

This part doesn't bother me and it is I think deliberate - they want the focus to be on the resources, and not just planting cities anywhere there's an open spot with some grasslands like in Civ4, and the current system seems to achieve this.

But I agree that this is a problem.. it's why I was against some artificial maintenance cap. Massive city-spamming empires shouldn't be easy to create, and they certainly shouldn't be the best/only way to play a-la-Civ4, but it should at least be a possibility. Perhaps a less-than-ideal possibility so that we don't see these every game, if that's the tone they want to set for Elemental, but not impossible.. this stacking maintenance cost makes it a certainty that, at some point, one more city is frankly impossible no matter what resources it's near or how strong your economy is.

If we must have a maintenance cost, I think a better system would be a percent maintenance that increases multiplicatively as you get more cities; say each additional city costs you 20% of your (current) income, such that 1 city = 100% gold generation, 2 = 80%, 3 = 64%, 4 = 51%, and so on. As you get more cities this formula asymptotically approaches 0% income; this means your income gradually gets closer to 0, but never goes negative. So you can technically make your empire as big as you want, you just eventually get to a point where you can't afford to buy new stuff or military maintenance. But still it's never impossible to continue growing your empire due to negative income, just impractical.

[By the way, the 20% formula above would put the point of diminishing returns at about 5 cities - if each city produces about the same income (obviously not the case, but assume it for the sake of argument) then 4 or 5 cities have nearly identical income, making the 5th city not worth the cost to build, with a 6th city actually lowering your income even once it's built up - the point is that you can still build a 6th city next to a gold mine if you really want to, without your income going into negatives, you'll just be making less gold than before - it's impractical, not impossible. I think the ideal empire being 4-5 cities is a good number, but by adjusting the percent you can make it any number you want.]

Unless they are were put on the chopping block - I'm pretty sure that the gold costs are to encourage creation of vassal states

5-10k gold is easy. Just build caravans. You get them in the first research of the diplomacy tree. I think you can send them to allied towns too, though I haven't been able to test it yet. Caravans are super overpowered...

And also.. you're an idiot. 5 gold from a gold mine.. what if your city has two? What if it's a gold production city? You can pretty easily get a tier 2 city for +20% gold production, what about pubs and inns and markets, and god forbid you actually build that palace! Not to mention the other percentage bonus buildings for gold.. I already have a single city ramming out 47 some odd gold, without caravan routes. 47 gold is enough to support 9 cities by itself along with 20 units for defense. The other 9 cities can ram out gold buildings themselves. Don't forget treaties.. lord man. The start of the game is meant for exploring, where you wander around looking for purses and dragon bones (100g is probably too much for a level 1 adventure place by the way), not immediately having a fully operational city. And I always build the mill first too..

With Caravan routes it's producing 178... I have two other cities that are also ramming out some high end gold. I'm absolutely certain that the cost for additional settlements is an easy decision to build as long as you have a city or 2 that is producing lots of gold, as the caravan from high production cities carry more. I'm not sure what the exact number is, but you need x gold cities per expansion city to be able to perpetually expand. As each new city you build will be another trade route for ALL your cities.

First, let's remember balancing isn't completely done.

Second, I mostly disagree with the OP. Yeah gold is scarce in 3c at the beginning of the game, but it should be. I (like ddd888) ended up with 30-40K+ gildars and taking over the entire (large) map in two of my games...my gildar income was around 150/turn by game's end with 10-12 cities.

Also, why can't you build caravans when you have no gold? It's penalising you by removing one tool to remedy the problem.

  Yeah in my current game I have 8 cities and a gold production of 45 per turn.   Course if someone really has a problem with it they could just mod some changes till they're happy.  I think it does all boils down to patience. Some people want to expand and build things non stop, anything that slows them down is just in the way. RTS games spoiled them

  I'm old school, I like a game that makes me think. I'm not just churning out the same units over, and over with no thought of supply , or upkeep. I for see in multiplayer games huge fights over who controls the resources.  Over extend yourself and you could find yourself in a really bad position.

Err the wages for units actually makes sense, with the exception of elites perhaps. The reason being that the peasant you hired to fight for you didn't purchase the equipment himself, you bought all that stuff for him, and thus he BENEFITS from having better equipment rather than a shitty spear. The same could be said for real armies. You don't pay the guy manning the machine gun more than the guy with the rifle.

Perhaps you are confusing wages with equipment upkeep (which the game doesn't do)

Err.. I usually build a research building before the merchant.. in fact I often skip the merchant altogether for my first few cities, as I find enough gold from adventure points. Those dragon bones give 100g each, which would be a gruelling 100 turns with a single merchant, which is simply not worth the wait in my opinion.

I agree however that the information could be better displayed, as I have no idea what my caravans are pulling in, nor can I tell what that '10%' from trade applies to in the city screen, and whether or not it's exponential (which it seems to be). As far as pacing is concerned.. it might be true that you obtain too little gold at the start and too much at the end.. but without that curve, it's doubtful you could ever afford those 800g items for your champions, so I'm not entirely convinced there is anything wrong with it.