To expand a bit on the unit recruitment point. As a baseline for testing i started with all units having a recruitment of 0.5 2 i.e max pool of 2 with a replenish rate of 0.5. It wasn't that the french could produce lots of knights (as they didn't have the cash at the start) but the proportion of good units to town militia. As the vanilla numbers for town militia are something like 0.9 8 the french AI could spam them each turn while they couldn't spam the better units. So for the same amount of income/upkeep their army ended up with 70%+ town milita and ballistas. When i'd changed all the pools to 0.5 2 they used that same amount of income to produce a smaller total number of units but with a higher percentage of good units.