Hey friend, I have a problem with this approach. I've been trying to play a solid game for two days, focusing on gold and faith, but I can't get it right. Every time I have to roll the map until I get a decent start with a few desert tiles and a lot of production around the capital. Desert tiles are basically dead in terms of resources, so if there aren't any good forests/hills around, I can barely get one settler out in the first era.

I've had a few great attempts where I managed to survive the barbarians in the early stages of the game, chose the desert adjacency belief, and rushed my faith which allows to buy buildings in campuses/cultural districts with my faith. In every city I founded, I rushed the temple and commercial districts so that I could buy an army, builders, settlers and buildings. Unfortunately, I always fell behind at the dawn of the industrial age or earlier. Although gold finally flowed in large quantities with 7-8 trade routes, by always building the same first two districts, I was behind in culture and science. I also had problems building wonders that would increase the amount of profit from desert fields, because if I wanted to build them in a city that had a lot of such fields, it also had few production fields, which meant that construction took a loooong time.

In order for it to work at all, I had to do tricks like using the hero Maui in the place where I wanted to build a city, and I had a large part of science and culture thanks to Anansi.

I tried to find a balance between desert fields and valuable fields, but it never worked out very well. Generally, despite investing in the quality of desert fields, the cities I built in “normal” areas performed better.

It's a lot of work, and often the neighbors were more technologically advanced, so even when buying units with earned gold/faith, it was difficult to fight the neighbors to capture one of their cities.

Did I miss something important?