I played against another xbox player who fast castled immediately and had about 5 knights outside my base but initially he couldn’t attack my base because I had a few infantry and a few archers plus towers as Koreans.
My economy was obviously crap because it didn’t take long for the other player to build a castle outside my base and then bomb my TC with petards. This was on a 1v1 desert map with two large oasis areas of trees and it seems there are 2 rhinos but camels are not worth food.
I did my best to get food from rhinos and dump 150 before my villagers get a full load but I think my overall economy is broken. To get 800 food for castle age I’d need to harvest only wood and then build heaps of farms, that way I convert everything to food and gold only, no wood when advancing to castle age because it simply isn’t required except for a couple of cheap buildings. So feudal age I should have 10 farms or something? Otherwise I can’t see how I can advance.
I expect players to rush me so I like to build a couple of towers near the wood source and have about 6 units especially when they build a stable and barracks near my base. I could try getting more villagers in feudal age because that’s where I seem to have trouble, but if I have economy only and they send 3 scout cavalry it would probably destroy me in some way. Either an enemy player could pin down my wood source and prevent me from getting any resources there, or, they could harass my gold or stone mining and make it impossible to do anything.
Since I only have 1-2 months of free multiplayer service on xbox once every so often I’ll play some more games in ranked and see if I can sink my ELO low enough to find players who aren’t following some exact formula to victory. I watched some low ELO legend videos on YouTube and it was pretty funny watching people fool around. Ideally I won’t reach 5 ELO though 
I might do some social player versus ai games too I just don’t see how it could be interesting unless I’m sick of everything else.
I did notice that the other player built a market early which I think is vital for fast castle. Often I need slightly more food or gold and the market is the fastest way to do this.
Forgot to add, the other player was telling me to resign and not waste their time, about 20 minutes into the game lol. But I dragged the game on and kept trying to harvest resources, forcing them to get the spies tech hahaha. After about an hour I just deleted my units and lost. On xbox when I hold LB + RB to delete walls or villagers it’s stupid because it’s only one at a time, maybe it was always like this? I feel like it should be possible to bulk delete walls or villagers instead of 1 per second.
Update 1: Next time I’ll focus more on hunting and make sure I get all herdables while collecting 80% food and 20% wood or something like this.