I think that voting is a pretty good incentive for patrons to donate more. From their posts it's clear they would like to double the cash flow, and I think it's a pretty good system. If anything, it could be more profitable to make it cost more.
The top left camp should introduce you to the orciad questline. You will have to decide between three warchiefs. Keep coming there every week.
To get gold, build the tavern first and then conquer or trade with as many towns as possible.
Easiest way for me is to use unren.bat, it's handy for all sorts of Ren'Py stuff. If you don't want to use it, you can open the bat in a text editor and see what settings it adjusts as well. It adds some hotkeys for dev/console mode and sets some booleans to enable stuff in like the console file.
If you turn on developer mode, then the in-game custom debug menu the creator uses will be on and will show you all the events, npc stats, allow instant finishing of research, allows you to play scenes, trigger events, see what nodes are undiscovered, and all of that.
