For this challenge, I am going to try to start a city from scratch with no incoming shipments of resources of any kind.  I anticipate this will be even more challenging than starting an account from scratch since a new account starts with a total of 1500 resources (500 of each to start plus two gifts of 500 of each) plus some gold and horses.  I want to experience what it is like to start a city without even those small advantages.

Day 1, 3:25 p.m.

My city was founded while I was offline, and in the time before I logged on managed to accumulate about 60 of each basic resource.  I also started with 20 research points.

My first goal will be to create a caravan.  For this I will need a horse plus 10 gold, as well as a marketplace.  I will use the caravan to harvest resources from the map to supplement my resources.  Since making a horse costs 7 gold, I will need 17 gold total to make a caravan.  I started with 0 gold, so rather than lowering my tax rate right away, I will leave it at 25% until I have 34 gold, enough to create 2 caravans.  Thank goodness caravans don't have gold upkeep.

OK, so the first building I create is a library.  I will need one in order to research Haggling and build a marketplace.  In addition, I want to start generating research points.  I also build a level 1 iron mine, since I have 3 iron and 7 food plots in this city.  I anticipate needing a lot of wood, so a lumberyard will be my next build.  However, I don't have enough resources for that yet.  After my current builds I have 6 wood, 16 clay, 20 iron, 6 stone and 72 food.

I research Haggling, which uses up all 20 of my research points.  My library makes 4 more each hour.

With 3 population at 25% tax, I make 3 gold per hour.  In 12 hours I will have reached my goal of 34 total gold and will be able to lower my tax rate to around 1%.

My hourly resource production is 10 wood, 10 clay, 8 iron, 10 stone and 11 food per hour.  In a couple of hours, I'll be able to upgrade a lumberyard to level 1.

7:33 p.m. (note times are my time, not server time)

I have enough resources to build a level 1 lumberyard, which increases my gold production to 4 per hour.  Coming up:  another level 1 iron mine, which will increase gold production to 5 per hour.  But I need to wait a bit for 4 more stone to accumulate (in about half an hour).

11:40 p.m.

I have now upgraded two iron mines, one clay pit, one lumberyard and one quarry to level 1.  In addition, I have reached my goal of 34 gold.  So I lowered taxes to 0%, which means my production is 0 gold, 15 wood, 15 clay, 12 iron, 15 stone, 10 food and 5 research points per hour.  I am going to need 100 clay to upgrade my paddock to level 5 tomorrow, so if I can squeeze in an upgrade of one more clay pit to level 1 before going to bed I will.  My goals for tomorrow are to upgrade paddock to level 1, build 2 horses, build a level 1 marketplace and build 2 caravans, then start harvesting.  After that I will focus on more resource and library upgrades.

I did manage to research Timekeeping.  I am thinking of saving my research points tomorrow for when I am able to upgrade my marketplace and research Bartering and Improved Loading.  Those have pretty hefty research point costs, and I don't really need any of the other researches yet.  It's a waste of time to not be researching stuff, but the researches I can "afford" right now are pretty short anyway.  Thus the need to upgrade the library.