I see a few things that if altered should greatly improve your start.
7 cities in 1380AD is really, really small, more early workers combined with chopping for more settlers faster will probably get your at least 8 by 1AD. On Earth 18 though, it looks like you will run out of room quickly, once that happens work out whos your weakest neighbour and take his land
. More land = more power!
Build waaaaayyyy less farms, cottages are easier to get a massive return on by a vast margin. For now just use farms to balance food requirements. You could also had chopped a lot more trees to speed up expansion and gettting cities up and running very quickly, the Imperialistic trait Catherine has only really shines with tree chopping and/or slavery, plus a tile with a forest on is pretty weak for a city to work, a cottage/mine is better in nearly every case.
Your building a lot of buildings your really don't need, the best example in your save is the monuments..... Catherine, the leader you are using has the Creative trait so you never have to waste
on monuments!
Next is the numerous walls you have built, walls are a building most players will avoid in almost every case. They are occasionally helpful in defending a particularly vulnerable city, but I very rarely build them unless I'm intending to use castles a lot.
Other examples are temples, monastaries and colloseums in odd places.
Lots of granaries and libraries on the other hand is a good thing.
Build more units, lots more. You are currently 14th in military strength, if you waste less on worthless buildings you can get a big military and get more cities easily
Is there a specific reason you have saved up so much gold? If not your 750 gold could be used to run a 100% science slider for a long time increasing your research a fair amount
Your not running bureaucracy
. A well cottaged bureaucracy capital routinely provides a lot of players sometimes with over 300
all on its own! As such good cottage sites are favourable for a capital,
are also boosted (just not as well) and your city would have an increase of 11
if you just swapped
.
Personally I would have swapped my capital to Yarsoslavl' for mass cottaging earlier on though.
