Are archers too demanding?

[DaLagga]

So unlike weapons and armor which degrade at 10%/year on the main kingdom map when equipped, bows degrade at 50%/year, 5x the rate. They also produce more slowly, likely due to the fact that the tech doesn't give bowyers anywhere near as much of a buff as the smithy (+70% vs +250%). These two facts combined means that it takes an enormous amount of manpower to field archers as compared to melee soldiers which seems a bit odd seeing as how, if anything, bows should be way easier to make than swords or armor.

For example, let's say you had an army of 5k melee troops equipped with 8x weapons and 8x armor. That in total would cost you 4k of each in replacements each year which, with all tech, can be accomplished with a workforce of ~200 in the smithies (plus those needed for resource manufacturing/harvesting). Compare that to the ~650 workforce you need in bowyers just to sustain the same 5k archers in bows alone, or ~750 in total if you decked them out in armor too.

In short, maintaining archers takes ~6.5 the workforce as does maintaining melee troops without armor or ~3.25 the workforce as melee troops with both weapons and armor. Does that seem a bit off to anyone else?

Edit:
I should also point out that this massive investment gets you a unit that can barely tickle anything with tier 4 or 5 armor or higher.

[love]

I think archers are supposed to be a force multiplier than an actual combat-ready unit on their own.

Therefore, fielding them is like bringing in support units in AoE2 - powerful but expensive, as they can hit targets multiple times before getting attacked themselves and I think the autoresolve also gives a ++ when you've got archers in the army.

[DaLagga]

But that's the thing. They aren't a force multiplier exactly because they're all but worthless against even mid-tier armor and many armies are heavily armored. Sure, they devastate unarmored opponents and can wipe entire divisions with ease, but again, outside of weaker armies, most consist primarily of troops in at least medium armor where archers do next to nothing.

I just fought a couple of battles against ~5k armies and a good 80% of their troops had at least 4 armor. I'm not kidding when I say that my catapults literally did more damage than my 9 full teams of +8 Tilapis archers.

[Gamatron]

I will tweak the damage a bit. Maybe bows and other gear should indeed be normalized in terms of consumption.

[Zastaver]

you got to remember that archers give you a option for un answered damage before the main clash, sure there not likely to kill anything but there impact on moral and the few people they kill with proper skirmishing is what your after. look how archers where historicly used before the longbow and crossbow.

[dsiOne]

Bows, and of course arrows, should see a lot more wear and tear than metal melee weapons. I think its backwards right now though with bows degrading at something like 5x the rate of arrows. (my current game is 6%/year arrows and 33%/year bows)
Is it possible to tie the spoil-rate to usage of the archer training grounds? Or even directly use up the equipment in training like other jobs - like 10 arrows/person/day and .01 bows/person/day, and of course the training amount asked for means more or less people 'working' overall.

Outside of that they seem pretty powerful to me, decimating non-armored infantry, and doing heavy morale damage to armored units that (in my experience) tends to make them shatter sometimes even before entering melee combat.