Hehe, its true I do like to beat my self up in SP games
Though my real intention in playing with those settings was to encounter the AI as quickly as possible to see what it was doing for the AI threads
I suppose 1100 income on 18 provs isn't that much, I had anywhere from 450-600 on 6-8 provs, so my average was actually slightly better than yours. Of course my upkeep was horrible as my army was maybe similarly sized to yours too... I didn't build a single temple or castle, and only a couple of labs where I found an interesting mage... Playing with the Neifelheim theme was also interesting as the damn units cost so much gold that it was hard to save enough cash for the big boppers... Maybe I should go with high luck and high turmoil hoping for some cash bailouts...
With Neifelheim I'd think that getting early national leaders would be a big boost...