Zhuge Nu are going to be able to do great against Shinobi.

With the bannerman, mounted samurai are just a better knight than the knights from Zhu Xi.

Open up with barracks, couple of dark age spearmen, and try to delay the pro scout a little bit, force the Zhu Xi player into an archery range and get some Zhuge Nu out on their side. Then afterwards, while they're busy pro scouting with the Zhuge Nu, Japan will just try and fast castle up behind that, and then we see some knights there at knight raids coming in.

Zhuge Nu are slow. Yumi Ashigaru are not. They're the opposite of slow. So the Yumi archers might be able to do a lot of damage and get out of it before the Zhuge Nu can react.

I always found Zhu Xi to be a little bit more of a tempo civ than China because a lot of those unique bonuses that China has to change dynasties to get, Zhu Xi just gets. The number one thing that I'm thinking about is Zhuge Nu. You don't need to go to Song Dynasty to get the Zhuge Nu, you just build an archery range and you get them. So if you're trying to deal with Shinobi, Zhuge Nu might be a pretty good strategy.