Strike?

What does it mean that your units go on a strike?

It means you're out of gold even with the research slider turned down all the way to 0%. It means you can't pay your soldiers and they'll start disbanding soon. It means you're in trouble.

What to do?

• Immediately, go to every city and switch your citizens to working commerce-rich tiles.
• If you have a large food surplus in a city but few or no good commerce tiles, pull citizens off the hammer/food tiles to be merchant specialists.
• If you don't have the buildings to do that, switch civics to Caste System so you can.
• While you're at it, switch to some cheaper civics if you're running expensive ones.
• Disband the units you need least yourself rather than letting the computer decide for you. You don't want to lose a veteran unit or one that's holding a vital position.
• Build courthouses, markets, grocers, banks.
• Prioritize techs that will benefit your economy such as currency or printing press.
• Get your workers busy to work on commerce-rich tiles and especially cottages.
• Speaking of which, this may have been what led to the problem. Have you laid down enough cottages and had citizens working them?

The problem ofc occured after the enemy "broke through" my lines in the ironman challenge. They savaged my cottaged rivervaley(and everything else). I was just wondering what exactly happened but i noticed soon that units started disapearing. I noticed however that they didnt take as many as they needed to get to 0 each turn just like 0 then 1 then 2 then 3 etc. At least i had second longest surving and longest with a save atm. How to fight it i could figure out myself there just is not much you can do when your surrounded y stacks upoon stacks of knights.

yeah that´s a problem some people face in that challenge

oddly enough i didn´t. i did not improve many squares to begin with (the winerys, a pasture, 2 random cottages and a farm if i remember correctly) as i couldn´t bring myself to build more than 2 workers.

that means either

a) i stopped research at the right time in order to build up money for my military (walls and longbowmen, pikemen would have been great though i think) and the 2 great prophets contributing 10 a turn certainly helped.

b) (much more likely) i did not grow enough of a military so the problem of maintaining it did not present itself.

i think it is quite tricky in the ironman challenge. you will want some commerce tiles to help you with researching and piling up some cash for the time when you will not have any improved tiles left. you have to find a point in the timeline where you can protect your tiles and another point where you sit back on your stockpiled money and be able to pay your troops for the amount of time you assume you will survive.

the first point is probably around the time you slingshot monarchy, as those wineries are just yummy. the second one? i have no clue.

i probably did not build enough units and was very conservative in my estimates of what i could afford and you apparently were too optimistic

fun challenge though, eh?