you don’t boom fast enough by the time italy gets out guard skirms that can harrass your vils on the map. italy gets to age 4 by 10-11 mins say and immediatly has a batch of skirms out 35 secs later and they immediately start going around attacking your vils.
Now you can have units or buldings around to defend but a) that slows down your boom b) you can defend but you can’t punish them cause they have 5 speed and can just run away back to their turtle and they have guard stats (which you don’t have since you don’t get it for free) so even if you catch them you may not win cost effectively.
so the italian player is constantly able to dictate the gameplay while you have to hold on to try and outboom and defend a larger area. it flips the logic of map control on its head. on lower levels this may not matter since people can’t raid but at higher levels they will just raid the entire map.
you may have more res but the italian is in control
you are basically describing out crates works , you are trading shipments for res that are not profit since you are not getting anything extra but crates are a key dynamic in 1v1 play since it doesn’t matter if you are profitting you just need what you need to win now.
now imagine if you can have crates that can be collected without the threat of raids, while also generating xp along the way so that you can send more crates, all the while you are also getting xp from the towers you build and the basillica which also provides you with defenses and path blocking
the lombards are a problem but the real problem that is harder to fix is the skirm, being able to pump out guard skirms that can raid safely the moment you get to industrial is just not balanced, you effectively save 1.2k res and the research time so gain so much tempo while the opponent will have to spend res on atleast vet and guard upgrades (so atleast 1.6k res to 2.4k res) to be able to fight your damn skirms.
even then they can run back to their base where towers have bonus against cav and you might also run into the papal guards they get from age up that is also potentially doubled from the advanced politcian card, all guard level.
the same reaso is why the otto mosque fi is also getting too strong since you basically get a bunch of guard level units pumped out in short succession, but atleast there otto have less of a followup and can’t raid with impunity