Throughout the war they suffered constant defeat and humiliation, and would require continuous German assistance just to survive. What problems did they have that the other countries didn't have to deal with?
[How accurate was the saying "shackled to a corpse" when referring to Germany in WWI?] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3436bs/how_accurate_was_the_term_shackled_to_a_corpse/)
This is an answer I've given previously. When the war began, the Austro-Hungarian Army was ill-lead, trained and equipped; this resulted in catastrophic losses which decimated their ranks of trained soldiers and officers, even worse than with other combatants. The consequences of this was that a mortal blow was struck to the Army's capabilities, from which it never truly recovered. Officers coming into the ranks lacked the multi-lingual skills of their predecessors, and so commanding a multi-ethnic army was made all the more difficult, while Conrad von Hotzendorff's baleful influence poisoned the Army from 1914 until he was finally sacked in 1917.
In many ways, the utter calamities of 1914 pre-destined the performance of the Army for the rest of the war; only on the Isonzo Front could the performance of the Army be considered passably good.
A Mad Catastrophe by Geoffrey Wawro
Collision of Empires by Prit Buttar
World War One: Austria-Hungary and Germany by Holger Herwig
The First World War, Volume One: To Arms! by Hew Strachan
Good question, firstly, might I recommend this series on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUcyEsEjhPEDf69RRVhRh4A , as it is an in depth look at the first wold war. Nextly as you will hear by watching the series, a high ranking officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, Conrad von hötzendorf, like much other commanders on the onset of world war one had the mindset that war was honourable and quick, and did not have exposure to the modern military technology of the time or tactics that came with it. It is important to remember French soldiers paid the price for their elaborate and colorful uniforms that they wore because of that mindset. The Austrian rail system was very poor as well, soldiers traveling south on the rail system to the Serbian front could not re route to the Russian front mid trip. Soldiers, and commanders both where problems, but a very big part was the ethnicity problem. Austro-Hungary was a very ethnically diverse nation, with Austrians, Pols, Hungarians, Czech, Bosnians, Croatians, etc... causing a language barrier, volume 49, page 399, of the independent states that Slavic soldiers of the Austrian army desert to the allied (presumably Russian side).