They cost too much, but they are usefull for putting on the walls of your settlement because they can Stand and fight. This is the best way to use Melee Archers because, a lot of the time you have to worry about the ladders or towers dropping off infantry and killing your archers.
I tend to prefer putting my infantry all near the gate or opening because this is normally where the main fight is going to be and you have a better chance to rout the enemy.

Guard, Norse, Highland/Highland Noble Archers, Ottoman, or any of the others with decent Melee stats are perfect for this reason, so that you don't have to put ur DFK (or equivalents) on the walls to prevent Murder of ur Missile dudes..

Building expensive melee archers isn't always very practical because a standardized army is far better than one which includes a huge roster of units - for practicalilty's sake. For retraining, or organizing (like when you have to put 55 spearment, with 40 spearmen to , make it 95 etc etc...) it sucks when you can't have like ,,, 5 units of Trebizond archers that you make into 4 (after the batlles).. rather than , 2 Guard archers, 2 treb, and 1 peasant archers = you can't really re-organize as easily.

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