Ensure you're talking about events since the last announced update, when they were adjusted. A good rule to go by is that, all other things being equal, you should win against peasants of the same CS as your army. Taselak has high population and high quality RCs in their favor. RC quality (or existence at all) and population influence citizen militia to a large degree. A realm on EI tried calling citizen militia and still lost their battle. And now some replies to various comments...
It's not only a production hit anymore, but also a control and morale hit. It can also be made into a regional buff itself, but I'm not yet in the practice of doing that. It can be converted later, allowing the changes to even stack on each other the longer they are around.
I'm ignorant of any differences in SI's birth rate from other continents, but it could very well be so.
If they called citizen militia while others existed, that is (most likely) a bug. There were some quirks as the first-called citizen militia had to be manually tweaked to 'Peasants' unit type to enable their going back to work over time. And Endelee was forgotten and had to be adjusted later too. Also, if there are very few (say, under a 100 or so) actual citizen militia in the entire realm, there's a chance of it being available. Old code had calling citizen militia always available if under around 100 realm-wide militiamen. I changed it to scale and have a small chance of being available at around 100 or so realmwide citizen's miltitia and a greater chance if around 5 or so.
I don't really make decision decisions of what goes away or is created or is disabled for a continent, though I certainly advocate my own views. I mostly fulfill the huge list of things already written as TODO or FIXME code comments, have been broken and not working, approved feature requests on bugtracker, and approved feature requests on the Feature Requests forum. This particular instance is of something that had been broken and was re-enabled and then, with angry peasants, updated with the looting-based peasant changes, with actual amount generated being the primary difference.
Past incarnations of the War Island fought for much longer for control of the island than has passed thus far.
Finally, I would remind of the words from the front page: BattleMaster is also a game under active development. New features are being added and gameplay and balance are constantly tweaked to improve the game further.
