[thejeff]

Taxing?

Raising taxes increases unrest and thus will lower income in the (not very) long run. Patrolling counters the unrest but kills population and so lowers income in the longer run. I usually only increase taxes on provinces I expect to lose and occasionally on my capital for the first few turns for an boost to fund initial expansion. (Use the starting army to patrol until you have enough to attack.)

Scales are certainly a question. If you're trying to build high resource troops, you need production scales.

More importantly, though: You're halfway through the second year and have 7 provinces? You should have twice that, at least. (Unless it's a crowded small map and you're hitting AI nations before you can get more, in which case you need a blitz strategy: a heavy bless or SC pretender.) I'm not very familiar with Jomon, so I can't really give specific advice, but you need to focus more on early expansion. Try for a province a turn and start moving turn 2 or 3 at the latest.

Don't worry so much about temples and high PD until you've got the expansion going.

How do you look in the graphs compared to the AI? Provinces and income especially.