Having difficulties with Regent Level !

[CIVILIDEES]

I've played civ games for a long time now and won each time at with clear differences. But with this game i'm in big trouble!! Call to power2 was a piece of cake compared with civ3 .

Set up my game = Huge world , Large continents, 5 opponents ,American

It seems that i am behind in science , number of cities , wonders,everything!!! It don't seems to work with fast city building , speed up science, fast exploring , enough military support. My opponents seems to build cities in a incredible tempo !! By time i've build 5 they have like 10 cities. Switching as fast to Republic , then to democracy doesn't help me either (i was the first to switch. Only in CASH!! The wonders are also build before me !! I am now like in 1450 having like 30 cities or more ,democracy could only build the great library !! having like 750 points while all my rivals having 1300 or more points!!!
Positive Note : i have (a lot )of cash (more) then adversaries and my territory is more finished (road and irrigated,mines)
Noticed also that my adversaries are building there cities closer one to another. Trade income seems also more difficult with my opponents. Diplomacy is ok Peace with everybody. Im like 2 or 3 techs behind opponents., with highering my Science to 60 or sometimes 70!!
If anyone can help me ,please give me good strategic advices
Thanks
DEES

[DaveV]

Food is the key to early expansion. Build cities near cows and wheat, then irrigate those squares if you can. A city with good food can spit out settlers at regular intervals. City specialization is a good idea: cities with good food build settlers, cities with good shields build units to explore and garrison your cities.

Use rushbuilding when you need to: it solves any unhappiness problems by reducing the city size, and speeds up the crucial early game.

[Jack_www]

In my current game I am playing as the Americans on huge map with 16 civs(2 have dies, and 2 only have one or two cities left).
I am playing on Regent level. It the early part of the game I snet my scout out to look for huts and got alot of early techs this way. What I did was sell them to other civs who had no new tech and trade them to civs with techs I did not have. This really helped me out in the tech race. One thing if you want to be on top of tech is that you must trade techs with the A.I. THIS IS A MUST!!!! This way you can get a lot of gold a turn, bankrupt the computer civs, and be able to set the science rate up to 100%.

One thing I did too was since I ran out of room really fast to expand because there were so many other civs on the map I decided to take the cities my miltary force to expand. What I did was found the weekest civ next to me and attacked them early in the game(got 5 really good cities that were close to my capital.) Thus target Civs that are weaker then you and take them over. In My curent game I am second in world power, the leader in the tech race, and soon will have the best culture rating. I also was able to trigger a golden age right at the ending on the middle age, that helped me in resreach and was able to get a couple of wonders down really fast thanks to the bonus in production. Also I have been able to start to widden the tech gap between me and the other Civs. I am also making 1200 gold/turn.

Oh yes anther way to make money is to sell cities you capture that are really far away form your capital to the AI civs. They will pay you lots of money for these cities, but dont sell them to the same civ, sell one city to each civ, get more money and the AI wont be able to do much with the cities you sell them.

[Garth Vader]

My current game on regent is really close. I am amazed at how fast the Ai expands. My capitol is on a flood plain next to a wheat special and I am only on par with the AI's near me with numbers of cities. Large Map 8 civs we have around 16 by 200AD.