This is the story of my game of Civilization IV Adventure Fifty-three from Realms Beyond Civilization.
The scenario for this game is to start with virtually unlimited gold which can only be used for deficit research. So you can build the best researching economy without worrying about balancing the budget. I'm afraid I don't have much to say on the origin of the concept, which I don't remember. I just had it written down in my list of ideas for a while, and now seemed like a good time to run it as an easier just-for-fun game and with no tech trading as per the surprisingly strident chorus in the Adventure 52 info thread.
The starting position had options, though it mostly just landed that way by the map generator rather than my hand of tweaking. You could move west for a plains hill but lose river access; or move south for a river plains hill but lose the ivory and some grassland; or settle in place. I chose to stay in place as I usually do to playtest.
The significant edit I made was to move Japan's start much farther away to the east. Originally Tokugawa started at the ivory cluster in the center of the map, 10 tiles away from our start. The player needed more breathing room than that. Other than that, my edits were minimal, mostly centered around the two-gold area north of the capital. I hate seeing gold that can't be worked for lack of food, so I added the banana and a river to turn several tiles from desert to floodplains. I honestly forget whether I placed the marble in the tundra to the south, but whether or not I did, it illustrated the scenario concept by encouraging a bad city there with no financial consequences.
I did select the AI leaders, the criterion being low chance to demand cash from the player, so as not to saddle the player with diplomatic hits. Yeah, that meant Tokugawa showed up as a neighbor for two adventures in a row; I'll find someone else next time.
My own strategic plan is to ride the unlimited economy to the max, all the way to space. Rely on a Bureaucracy capital to get to Liberalism - Democracy, and then build cottages elsewhere. A well-timed war might be useful, probably in the cavalry/cannon era as usual.