Trade away your initial luxury for Gold

[Kinseek]

You usually start with at least one luxury resource near your initial city - perhaps even more. Hooking this one up should give you surplus happiness, which at the very beginning you usually won't need because your cities are neither many or big enough to give unhappiness. The AI is more then happy to give you plenty of gold, either a direct large payment of a few hundred perhaps or gold per turn treaties. I suggest making such a trade as soon as you can since the extra gold at the beginning is very nice.

It benefits you and it hurts the AI by taking gold out of his coffers.

[pdxsean]

This is a pretty interesting strategy that I never would have considered. I believe the AI will offer you 10g/turn of the deal (so 300 gold on standard speed) so it's not a bad tradeoff. One luxury = one scout or warrior, or almost one worker.

Personally, I'm finding that surplus happiness is pretty handy for getting golden ages. I hit my first golden age in my current game when I only had three cities... it sure helped get those libraries and whatnot in place.

[McLMan]

I like to keep the happiness for the early game golden age. I like to get one right after I've settled my "core" cities.