By the time your first knight is out, Chinese has the gold they need, researches the first gold upgrade, makes a few spearmen, and they can't go out anyway. So there's no big point in aging up faster as French.

When you lose your first four to five archers, the game is kind of over because China can just castle. You've got to be really careful, especially in the first 10 minutes as French.

French often go second stable first to leverage knight mobility and strength, because if Chinese fully invests in units, you probably can't get enough archer mass up in time.

And that's one of the advantages that you get as the French. You get to build up your knight numbers as you're in feudal age. So when you arrive to castle, you just upgrade them and you have a huge force. whereas Lucifer needs to build it up from scratch after reaching castle age.

The Great Wall Gate House, it's no longer that strong against bombards. Like it used to be that it almost one-shot bombards. Now with the nerf, it doesn't one-shot them anymore.