you play with 18 civs, emperor, pangaea, small map and there's no copper or iron available ? I play these settings very often and I got gangbanged by almost all civs if I cant build axemen. I usually try to get archery asap, build 6CG archers (more than 6 I lose 1 gold per turn per extra archer, which means my research is gonna be lower and lower), but AI keeps bullying me with crazy demands till I cant give anything else, then everybody DoW on me. Very fun, huh ? I wonder why do you always have to choose the warmonger path in higher difficults and diplomacy is so useless.

:) I feel you.

Build your cities on hills if you can. That little extra Defense Bonus really helps. Rush walls and barracks.
Try to hang on until you can build better units. :D

Take the Spartan Stance, try and Build in between 2 Peaks! or if there's a ton of peaks, try and build so that only a couple places can attack you. Then again if it's not that good of a Location....

Take the Spartan Stance, try and Build in between 2 Peaks! or if there's a ton of peaks, try and build so that only a couple places can attack you. Then again if it's not that good of a Location....

Since you aren't going to be counter-attacking it really doesn't matter what kind of tiles surround your city/unit, only the tile they are stationed on.

Spam archers (yes, more than six cost you money but they also tend to keep you alive and up on the power graph). Walls will help also and hope you get horses for horse archers. Beeline construction for catapults, then feudalism for longbows. Figure out who has extra copper/iron and do whatever you can to buy it from them. You will have to give up on being a tech leader but if you can build up an army quickly those core units should be able to live a while and you will only need to replace the catapults (use longbows to soften up the tough defenders if you don't have horses).

Running a specialist economy with scientists will make teching easier since you can pop an expensive tech and quickly switch between production and research as you acquire and lose access to copper/iron and when you mass-pump units for the land acquisition war.