Now on with a few notes on the empire itself. You have so much land to road and fill that it cannot be done with the workers you have. You have many towns making wealth, while moaning about filling in the gaps, so make more settlers.
You have 25 spears, that is crazy at this level. 15 warriors, too many. 1 archer, I would not build archers in this game. 1 settler, probably should have at least 4 moving into place.
I think 2 more spears being built. I would not be surprise to see that many are not vets. Where are your MDI? You do not have horses, so that should be top priority. Knights are available, if you had horses.
Not sure why you are racing down the tech tree for cavs, with no war. Why not get Ed and on to more useful peace time techs?
I am not going to go through all the towns as I know what to expect. A few towns placed down one off a river. Many towns with structures they should not have, colosseums, libs, courts and a couple that should have gotten a granary, but did not.
Where you are now:
Get settlers to fill in the gaps and do not expand, except to get the horses, untill you have filled. No more spears, start some MDI in places that can get them up quick and have a barracks.
Get that salt connected. To that end, do not spread out workers, they should be ganged in sizes that will get a given task done in one turn.
Keep some workers in the core to get all worked tiles fully improved.
Pay attention to what workers are doing. You have a lone worker mining a hill in a city that is on wealth. What does it need another shield for, it is making nothing? It does have a couple of tiles being worked and they have no road. So that is a loss of gold.
This is not C3C, so no unit support in Republic. That means you have to pay for all those troops. Here is where being spaced out hurts. You could get by on fewer troops in republic, if they could cover more than one city.
They can't as the distances are too great. Still, if you made MDI and disband some spears, you will be stronger and pay no more than now.
Too many happy faces for me, you are paying for them. You build colo/cath to accomplish that and they cost you a ton of shields and maint every turn.
A size 12 city does not need 11 happy faces, 6 will due, less as long as you have some content pop.
I want to go back to the CXXXXC spacing. Even if you think it is great to have 21 tiles in all the towns, you surely do not need it out side of the core. Specialist are not worth much in C3 or PTW as they only give 1 gold or beaker.
Edit: as I was quiting I saw a worker on a mountain tile in a town far away. What I cracked up about is that the next two tiles were also mountains, but had gems. So the worker was working the only mountain without a gem, ouch. Was this an automated worker?
