There’s no balance problem; all civs are balanced around being “OP” in some regard at some stage of the game. Your imbalance assumption can be generalized to every single civ with the only solution being to make all civs the same civ.
A defensive civ with a feudal advantage in army unit strength doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way of leveraging an army defensively if you haven’t already boomed. You leverage an army advantage by dealing damage. The longbowmen works as intended.
Perceived imbalance is a common when you lack concepts to describe why you’re losing. The most common culprit is accumulating mistakes giving the enemy a lead. By the time the lead manifests, whatever the enemy happens to kill you with seems OP, while the thing you lost to had nothing to do with it at all. Be careful never to assume imbalance.
As far as killing english in feudal is concerned, you don’t kill english in feudal. It’s near impossible. Their TC’s are too strong to rampush, and their longbowmen can nibble off at your units in a fortified position. NOTE that this is not enough to give them an advantage, that’s why they often attack. You don’t survive to win a game, you win game by grabbing leads.
You want to get out of feudal with an advantage. Either by repelling their army with a decisive strike or by surviving with better econ. Longbows are slow and benefit from brief clashes. If they ever get jumped at a single moment of army size disadvantage, they lose it all. You want to cater to this, and this weakness of theirs gets even worse vs a mehter speed aura.
Under absolutely no circumstances do you want to fight an English army before you’re ready to annihilate them. A tower can buy you some stalling time as you mass up. If they manage to push through and threaten your eco before you’re ready, forcing you to engage, you made some strategical error prior. If they hit age 3, it means there was a moment when you had 1800 more resources worth of army and could’ve wiped them but missed the opportunity. What’s scary about english is if they retreat while aging up. You need to be ready for this so you can do eco damage if they attempt it.
Pure Horsemen/Sipahi with upgrades do well against MAA/longbow. MAA don’t hard counter them, and horsemen hardcounters longbowmen more than MAA soft counters horsemen. Mehters even make your Sipahi quasi- MAA, the strength of their auras is so great it might get nerfed. If they add spears, you want archers. Then it’s a micro battle. The free sheeps can keep your food econ safe and on par with english farms for most of feudal, but without the farm investment even.
With your army comp having cavalry, you can force the english to leave army back home to be safe, forcing them to fight with a smaller army. You can also kill reinforcements crossing the map before the big main engage. It comes down to execution. In these scenarios there are a million of factors to improve and iterate upon. If you’re lacking direction, watching pro games, or swapping civ to english are all great ways of finding the details useful for dealing with early game aggression of any kind.
