The very rapid transition to castle age that Chinese is notorious for means that often there's some lancers that take you by surprise. So having a few spearmen never really hurts.

Even as the Byzantines, even with your economy, you're already investing so much into these systems, into the towers on the berries, into the aqueduct itself, because aqueduct takes so long to build. That's a lot of extra idle time. All of this slows you down. Then you spend so much food on these horsemen as well. So you just delay your castles by a whole minute and a minute you can see would have made quite a big difference here.

Byzantine players get in their mind that they can go for this because delaying and playing a little bit longer feudal is good because the percentile scaling makes systems better. The longer I go, the more workers I have. Problem is, China gets immediate value at the start of feudal. They get a huge spike up. The return on investment is just so much faster for China, which is why you always see them hitting these lean timings still to this day.

2TC against China, you just don't have the tempo. You got to actually like go for your own fast castle or like all-in feudal type play here.

And we all know how Chinese has legal map hacks with their third age landmark. So can utilize that at some point. Can see, you know, which gold vein the opponent moved out to and then send a few lancers that way.