And then sometimes you're just screwed

[Cer]

Unless I misunderstood something, that wasn't necessarily an advice to use swordsmen;

What I should have said, is don't research ironworking for swordsmen when bronzeworking and axemen will do.

I'm not sure about BTS, but in vanilla the AI won't build many axemen so an attack force of swordsmen early in the game is just the thing to beat the enemy to a pulp. Add one axeman to your stack of swordsmen and you will avoid being creamed by a single enemy axeman.