Patjay

This is a glitch right? I've heard some things about difficulty effecting it, but I've also heard otherwise. Can anyone explain what's going on here or how to fix it?

I'm about 70hrs in, >2k pop and have a trained army of about 500 and I still cannot get close to winning a single attack on an actual city. I'm assuming I'm missing something. I'm pretty confident my army supply is set up correctly, with high priority set, separate depots for each item fully staffed and right next to the warehouse. I always wait until fully supplied before leaving and am even adding in 175 mercenaries. Always set a few pips of siege equipment. I'm still getting destroyed every time I attack a city with 200-300 defenders where they only lose about 50 people vs >400 for me.

Any ideas as to what I'm missing? Thanks.

I've looked into how to solve this issue, as well as just throwing things at the wall, but there's got to be something I'm missing. I have this one ore outpost where my pigmen and humans are just constantly killing each other. Despite only 40 or so people living there in a city for 1.5k, it's probably responsible for about half my brawls. Fighting almost daily. The humans and pigmen live fairly far apart, there's plenty of services and health access. What annoys me the most about this is that i have another housing district with 4x the people living in it of 3 races that is basically completely safe.