I don’t know why people think monk is strong. As a Zhuxi player, when I reach the plantium I felt the FC strategy can’t be used at all. People always talk about 1 monk can beat 4 horsemen something like that, but that’s whole meaning of this unit, the monk has the slowest movement so in theory they won’t hit any archers and horsemen. If monk gets nerfed, what will be the function of this landmark? It will become pretty useless.
For FC, it is very easy to counter, just blockade the food source of Zhuxi then you win. If your feudal landmark is able to build any military unit, then build 1 unit and sent it to berries and Zhuxi player lost. If you don’t have a landmark like English or French, build some archers or horseman, and send them to Zhuxi berries and you win. You don’t even need to fight with monks . Remember, every unit ZhuXi build needs food.
The true imba part of ZhuXi is Song’s bonus, which makes farm transition super easy. But I can see the reason because ZhuXi’s castle and imp are pretty bad. ZhuXi doesn’t have any special units (Palace guard is a worse version MAA and NOB is similar to mangonel but worse version of mangonel in imp and grendier is worse than handcanooner in most cases) and special bonus unless you get Ming which is impossible in most games.