Oh, I see. Yeah, that's very much intended. Teeny weeny little cities are not meant to be able to support so much in the way of income-producers. There is more balance that is needed there for sure, but having populations that are well into the five digits in a reasonably-sized city is a big goal. And having a large pool of unemployed is super critical for a healthy city if you're being attacked.
To some extent there are some short-term problems here that I definitely understand why you're focused on. But there's a logical progression to that that just isn't quite gelling yet that leads into later stuff.
For instance, right now your biggest problems are usually just losing population to disease. When it comes to later losing buildings to raids against you, that's a whole other type of body blow. There's going to be a lot of balance work done around making that not a devastating ragequit situation. In the meantime there's a limited amount of point to trying to balance without that factor in there.
We should have the AIs hassling you properly within the next couple of days at the latest.
Oh, and also: resource generation from utilizing resources is meant to be a big thing, so that you have to do territory capture and control the map more. Certainly mining a resource already generates income for you, but actually using those resources in your resource-user buildings is something that's going to really make you able to have a lot more citizens and growth with fewer buildings in the future.