It's Been a Little While - Poles are Broken

One simple reason, farm shift-deleting in Castle/Imp. You can get 500 food per 8 farms in about 5 seconds by doing this, effectively trading wood 1:1. The strategy is to just put a ton of vills on wood, and 16-24 on food. When you need food, shift delete all your farms around your Folwarks and spam idle/click to reseed. On reseed you have 500-1500 food. Repeat as needed. If you get good at this you can non stop spam Winged Hussars from 10 stables with only needing about 80 vills (60 on wood, 16 on food). You can do a stupid fast imp this way while still making military.

They have to be beat in Feudal or very early Castle. After that, I have yet to see even matched players beat the poles once they get moving. Team games are worse. If one person is Poles, the other Chinese it's really dumb. I'm a 1200 1v1 rated player, 2100 TG, just for reference. Maybe it's different at different ELO's. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To caveat this, if you have the correct civ you can still possibly win. You need good camels or cheap camels to stop the spam, but they can out produce you in every capacity so even making pikes or halbs they will eventually overwhelm you and you just toss in some obuch problem solved with camels/halbs. I just know I don't lose team games as poles unless someone on the other team is also poles and they know how to do the farm exploit. On maps like Arena, Poles don't lose unless you don't know how to play them.

Maybe people just haven't figured out good counter strategies? But I spend more time playing civs that should be good counters to poles and it's dam near impossible to win still (again, in an even matchup if they use the farm exploit).

As a reference, I played a TG as poles last night, with 85 villagers only with 24 on food (rest on wood or gold) I had the most wood and food collected of anyone in the game. That's broken. The highest vill count player was 130, a teammate who was playing as Khmer and went elephants.

This of course is up for debate and I am curious to see what people have to say about the Poles, particularly the farm exploit.

TLDR: Poles have to be beat in feudal/early castle or it's gg on even matched games because of farm Shift Delete exploit, unless you have the perfect counter civ.