If you play slow and give the AI enough time to sort out its finances, it will field some good units eventually, growing up from militia phase...

Here's some screenshots from a vanilla 1.2 campaign, about turn 150 IIRC.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 





I'm sorry but don't have any pictures of the french armies, I remember fighting lots of top cavalry (lancers and chiv knights) plus serious heavy infantry and missiles - they were one of the last factions to die in the campaign I took these screenshots, and had time to build some pretty impressive and quite well balanced stacks.