I have quite a few choice words for those who use this line without actually trying out the game and verifying.
One of the matches I played a match as Dravidians against the Malay, had pretty much the same looking result. Till castle age, I could trade blows in an equal manner and went up rather quickly. But the Malay player caught up on timing and cleared my archers patrolling around his base with Knights. I used the 200 wood to make a 3 TC turtle play. Upgraded to pikeman and tried to protect economy. However even with squires Pikeman don’t deter Knights. They just ran under my TC and reached my mill. The TCs had to be constantly garrisoned. I had done cross-bow upgrade when I reached Castle age. So tried to counter raid him by making a few. He just made a few skirms and did not even pull back his knights. I thought I could go imp and do woots steel. So Just idled my TC and went imp. Bought stone and tried to castle one of my flank. To my surprise he had already castled there. lack of scout making past starting scout has this handicap for Dravidians. I tried to put a defensive castle. But once he knew he just Knight raided me on the other flank and I had no answer. Even if I cancelled my imp, I could not make any unit instantaneously.
Floating a lot of wood or any other resource for that matter is testament to the fact that the economy and villager distribution on resources is not optimal. If we gave 10 wood per villager like @UpmostRook9474 said in another thread or 200/400/600 as @Pulikesi25 proposed a while back. We are only giving unnecessary resources which would need to be sold at whatever price the market offers. The better idea would be to replace this wood with a food eco bonus.
Here is what I propose as a good economy bonus as replacement for the wood bonus:
Town Center technologies including aging up costs -25% food.
This will save -125 food to reach feudal as well as being earlier to a M@A rush. 200 food saving for castle age which will help bide some time to face a Knight spam. U can upgrade to pikeman as well as do cross-bow upgrade combo. If you manage to stall opponents push in castle age, good discount on Wheel borrow and handcart can help boost economy to push towards a 2 TC imp quickly.
Yup! They need some better economy bonus and special infantry to comeback when things don’t go according to plan. Thats why I had this techology called “Strike Corps” in mind. But DEVs seem to love Medical corps a bit too much.