I normally fight with 2 units of archers, cretans if I can help it, apart from playing as Eggy when I actually had as many as 5-6 bowmen in each army. But most of the time I make do with none when I'm away from archer-producing areas, or in early game. So in truth I haven't actually had much experience with archers, and in fact, I rarely even use archers, even on flaming arrows, in field battles because once they fire upon enemy formations in combat with mine they tend to hurt my units as much as they do the others. So I just keep them out unless I can get a clear field of fire, which is rare because my style is upclose, personal, deep-battle and everywhere-at-once.

My favourite activity with archers is to storm poorly-defended armies, rout their defenders with arrows by making them run away from the breach while charging cavalry in, then once I've secured the lower/outer city I will just run my archers to the town square and fire upon the remaining defenders who will rout the moment they leave the town square being broken as they are, and will not leave the square if they're the last unit left, being the perfect sitting ducks. 0 casualty assaults are common when I have 2 units of Cretans in my arsenal.

It's sad to know there doesn't seem to be much difference, though; I was hoping I could find something that would make archers worth their while in a larger variety of situations.