Attacking first wins games nearly every single time. This is why Japan is so high in the ranks - they’re in your base almost as fast as mongols, with enough staying power to dive the TC before the first attack is over.
Mongols on the other hand, or even english, merely harass one node at a time. Math can fix that, it can sort itself out and recover. Lose access to gold? Chop some wood instead, build up a counter push, expend excess wood and go back onto the gold with a couple extra to make up for lost time.
French and Jeanne, same thing. This is why French was dominant for so long. Not only could they attack first, they could stay and get to know you.
By the time villagers have scrambled off every node and reshuffled to whatever is safe (whilst still under attack) the eco balance is so fargone that every concieved buiild order goes out the door
And this eliminates 90%+ of the playerbase on its own as most have a very limited scope of crisis control. In my experience, most players follow strict build orders and thrive off of the layman structure of “I need X amount here to produce this non-stop out of here”
But very very few will know what to do wiith an extra 2000 food and nothing else. Most will throw every villager back on wood fuedal only to find that food+wood against a growing gold based comp will inevitibly fail
So the only real choice at that point is to quickly build a market and sell the excess. But how much? And what is the new "I need x amount of these to get these?
This quickly becomes a calculus which is too hard to comprehend whilst the attacking player need only concern themselves with ensuring they’re still producing units and transitioning into farms - whilst the defenderis dealing with an ever growing, impossible calculus problem to solve, which then becomes unsolved every time the town bell rings with straggling villagers going every which direction.