If you're in a tight situation and are heavily outnumbered, instead of being in a field and getting surrounded try using your church as a makeshift fortification.
No you didn't there are multiple areas to control sometimes when you establish a new area with no proper defense and the enemy chose to attack that place this a useful last stand tactics it buys significant amount of time for your main army or reinforcement to arrive or even defeat and repeal the attack
Since villagers tend to hide in the church, at least they are safe. And as long there are your soldiers within reach, raiders will leave your buildings alone.
The threat never even reaches my village, I always spot them walking when their still in the next region and just find a good spot to intercept them far from my town
had something similar happen where I had only one spearmen unit of 20 vs four raider units; funneled them into a street and took out 3 units and halfed the fourth
I usually have that issue that my army is doing stuff on one side of the map, and then some idiots come raid a village on the other side. Of course it takes months to get there, so that village is gone
This might also be possible to some extend with burgage plots. They only have two entrances, and the fence is impassable. Next time I start a settlement, I will try building long burgage plots parallel to the region's border, put my archers inside, and plug the entrances with spearmen.
they released this game way to early even though it started 7 years ago. I already finished everything including hard difficulty. The game is right in difficulty but the mechanics are less. They need to develop more techniques, mechanics, lifestyle, and most of all fix crop harvest. Crop harvest suck in this game.