So you've started a home city and everything was find and dandy, now you realize you want to build troops, buy mercs, plunder cities and go on quests. Now gold is the limiting factor in your quest for a thriving metropolis and here's the skinny on how to get more. Step one build more peasants and put them on a gold node or three with accompanying horse cart. Should you exhaust a gold node it will return in two or three days time. Now that's done but the gold rate is nothing special to write home about, so you gather up your trusty troops and your hero and head for the great lands of Mythador. Once you've created an army with all your troops and one or two peasant units move through your local region until the "view map" button appears next to your army window. This will take you to the next installment of gold gathering...
So you're staring at a map with creeps of one sort or another all over it and it hits you, these are all gold on the hoof (or foot)! Now you will face a couple of different types of creeps on the view map area. Some will patrol it and ransack your camp to see if you've left siege gear or unprotected villagers there. The other kind are stationary encampments of creeps. Typically orange groups on the mini map are patrols from the region and green/red creeps are encampments. Now after you slaughtered, ahem, cleansed the local countryside you can send in your villagers to bury the slain and collect gold for each unit buried. If you completely clean out the countryside you should be able to collect between one and two thousand gold. You are free to repeat this as you like to gather more gold and level up your troops.
Now for some folks that's just not enough gold supply and here's how to generate that last blast of gold. Gather all the troops you can and between 10 and 15 siege units. Now put stone in your army if you've got trebs in it and head for your favorite or least favorite NPC major town. Now instead of entering it to use it's merchants click "siege town" and click accept. This will take you into a siege battle for looting privileges of the town. Suggested attack lines consist of either speed rushing with fast troops and ladders or blasting your way in with trebs and a combination attack with siege towers. Upon success in your attack on the town you will have a certain amount of time to loot it with your peasants usually amassing sums of 3k food/3k wood/7k gold. This is an excellent way to build up your stocks quickly. At the current time you can even then re enter the town after you've exited the battle map and heal your troops in it. This is likely to change in the future.
Another exciting way to gather gold is to pvp and collect the loot afterwards which can prove to be a faster way then any because of the ability to get many battles in during the time it takes to siege an NPC town.