There are 3 things important to a good military, economy, tech and production. All three of these appear to be severely lacking in your game.....
Growing into
is something you should be trying to avoid, not farming more and growing further into it.
citizens provide nothing at all and the best use for them is Slavery, which would solve your production problems.
1685 is the age of at least Riflemen, if not nukes! Not pre civil service....
Something has gone horribly wrong, but putting your slider to 100% and researching at a
defecit will at least get you started.
With the general state of your economy, the slow teching and masses of
are really holding you back
If you are using automated workers, don't. They are awful until you understand them, and to do that you need to learn the basics. Hit cntrl+Y to place the tile yields on the map, this will help you pick things up a bit quicker and cntrl+R will add resource bubbles making resources easier to see for you, and anyone looking at your screenshots.
Your screenshot of Moscow shows a lot of the weaknesses in management.
With so much
you should be working cottages or specialists more than farms, farms add nothing in such cases unless your using the Slavery civic, which you aren't.
Don't bother farming plains tiles, they are very weak tiles till at least Chemistry. A city shouldn't really be workign these tiles till all good ones are being used, your city is unfortunately in chaos with the improvement scheme and tile usage, a lot of that would have been better off cottaged, especially the floodplains.
Beware of the Pyramids! They can be very strong but they are easily the biggest newbie trap in the game. They cost huge amounts and until you know how to do basic city management they won't give any benefit at all.
Walls are almost always terrible buildings, I would avoid them till you play on Emperor at least!
Edit:- Also, why is it that some countries when at war with each other can just swoop from city to city destroying, yet if it was your armies it just would not work like that? One time Mansa Musa completely wiped out Catherine like he was sweeping leaves off the pavement, he wiped her off the map.
Its more to do with having the right strategy, unit types, numbers etc. In BTS late game its quite possible to completely annihilate an entire civ in a single turn. Early on Horse Archers can make mincemeat of even medium sized civs in less than ten turns, it just takes some experience.
And one more thing... why it when you get allies they do nothing?
The AIs are really bad at war in general, its not until they get the big bonuses at Emperor and Immortal that they become worth anything.
Amber_10 said:
I had quite a few stacks of different units, the pikemen were promoted to attack cities.
Brian Shanahan said:
Well first of all swords are better than pikes at city attacks, they get an extra 10% before promotions.
As Brian quite rightly said, Pikes are not good at attacking cities. However the 10% he mentioned is the least of the reasons its a bad idea, for a start, the cost difference means if you put the same amount of
into Swords as you did Pikes you would have 50% more.
More importantly however is that Pikes comes with techs that are quite pointless, Engineering and Machinery are nowhere near as important as Civil Service! Not even both of them combined
. Wasting huge amounts of
on pointless techs really hurts your military efforts.
When it comes to building a stack up try to think of 3 categories of units.
Seige
These will be your heavy lifters, use them to bombard defenses and then suicide a few into an enemy stack. This will cause massive collateral damage and make the stack easy for your main attackers to crush. Seige should make up around 50% of your stack, more if your playing Vanilla civ4 and they can still kill units.
Main attackers
These guys are there to follow your seige into cities or stacks, their job is just to wipe out whatevers left and they should be made up of Axes/Maces/Musket/Rifles/Infantry etc. these should make up most of the rest of your stack after your seige.
Stack defense
This is where your Pikes come in. These units are there to protect your stack from counter units, Pikes will stop Knights, Crossbows will stop Macemen etc etc.
Mounted warfare is very different, relying on mobility to attack and is probably best left to learn later.
I would recommend reading
Sisiutil's begginers guide, its for BTS but most of the things still apply to Vanilla and Warlords.
Sisiutil has another
guide on stack composition too
