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I'm finding the early game really challenging, it's so hard to get a big enough militia to actually counter raiders,

Try getting your church up quicker, it'll pump you above 75% approval so you get 2 families moving in per month, also don't upgrade to burgage plot 2 until you need artisans

farming takes forever to make a decent food surplus

Sounds like you're on poor soil or using tiny plots, farming is super good if you have the manpower for it

trade is too damn expensive to get going with how expensive buying routes are.

The two trade development ideas (limit route to 25 gold and -10 to all import prices) are both must haves, if you're spending your first two dev points elsewhere you're wrong

Yeah it's for sure buggy and there are some issues definitely early game. I scrapped my first save two hours in and had much better luck the second time around.

Something that helped me a ton at the start was to give the burgages greaaaat big backyards to farm carrots. If you can arrange a burgage just right you can have it hold two families and they'll work together on planting and harvesting carrots/apples in the shared backyard. You can use roads to draw borders for the shape/size burgage you want and then delete the roads after you place the burgage inside.

I forget exactly what triggers it, but on the default middle setting (domination i think?) you get some free spears and shields pretty early on which allows you to make 17 spearmen that are enough to take out the early game baddies, at least they were on my second attempt that I'm still messing around on. Make sure you take care of bandit camps ASAP when you spot em. I'm not sure if they get stronger if left unchecked but the robberies can really snowball, and when you grab their camp you get a nice chunk of treasury money that you can use to hire mercenaries for the 2-3 group raider parties later on.

Another tip is after your farm workers finish sowing the crops you can reassign them to other stuff until september, no reason to keep em there unless maybe there's still wheat they're turning into grain. Also, if you have really big plots to harvest it's a good idea to put your workers on the farm maybe a week early and check the "harvest early" box. I lost a huge amount of wheat before I realized that stuff despawns if it isn't harvested/stored by october 1st.