The 13th century Mongols were approximately that close and even they used archery to provoke, disrupt, demoralize and goad their opponents into doing things that were dumb, as a part of a whole package tactical system. And their archery was considered exceptionally good, even among steppe peoples who were noted archers themselves. All of them had bows and knew how to use them, but there are no accounts of battles (again, to my knowledge) where Mongol archery alone sufficed to break their opponents the way we break ours in Bannerlord.
That's why for every three dedicated horse archers, the tumen had two men equipped with lances in addition to their bows, along with heavier armor, to close with and finish the enemy off.
Any weapon type was used to provoke, disrupt, demoralize and goad the opponent. Battles were not won by killing people, I have already posted statistics about that, that shows that during actual fighting about only 3-5% of men on each side were killed (on average, numbers could differ from battle to battle). Battles were won by making your enemy give up the fight, not by killing him.
That of course is not been realistically modeled in the Bannerlord, instead you win mostly by killing the enemy soldiers. There is very simplified morale implemented in the game, but even that works on friendly soldiers getting killed.
You need to keep that in mind when you compare killing effectiveness of archery in the game with the historical one. Which is why I keep repeating that all weapons in the game have much higher killing power then they had in reality.
You can't diminish killing power of archery in the game to realistic levels and not do the same with other weapons without distorting the overall balance of the game. But if you diminish killing power of all weapons to more historical levels, then you will get completely different game that would need total rework and would also likely attract very different players.
Of course. But in proportion to their historical abilities, they are way out of line, which leads to tactical distortions that make the game resemble a kind of funhouse mirror version of pike-and-shot. That's my main concern.
It is easy to fix: nerf the overall damage of arrows and/or increase the effectiveness of armor. Boom, done. Archers will still probably kill a lot of troops, especially at lower-tiers, but not utterly wipe the floor against anything approaching on foot and unshielded.
I don't find their abilities out of line. Players simply build ahistorical armies and then complain that they don't receive historical results. Even English at the peak of their archer use, when they were shooting whole French armies to bits as at the battle of Crecy did not had more then 1/3 of their armies as archers.
Debuffing archers will just make archers impotent in the field battles just like in the Warband. The last thing I want to see in the Bannerlord is the return of the Warband heavy cavalry spam. Bannerlord combined arms approach is much more pleasant to play and also much more historically accurate.
Buffing armor will make high tier units practically invulnerable to anything low tier. It already takes ages for a low tier unit to kill high tier one, and that includes low tier bows. And of course it would make player armies even more OP then they already are, because AI is restricted from building high tier armies.
So? They were hired as fighting men, for their abilities (or allegations thereof) on the battlefield. They were described as such in contemporary writing and given similar compensation (horsemen were paid more because horses cost more, obviously) to match. That nobles literally had better things to do with their time should be taken as an indication of two things:
1. That learning to ride well and use weapons effectively from horseback was just as much a lifelong skill as archery.
2. That cavalry was seen as the more decisive arm.
That also applies primarily to western and central Europe. Outside of that geographical region, in Eastern Rome, you weren't considered a complete warrior (as a noble) unless you could use a bow well, even from horseback while sending arrows in every direction. The Kievan Rus' boyars were (sorta) nobles and fielded as (mounted) archers.
Something can be seen both as useful and frowned upon at the same time. There is no contradiction there.
It didn't reflect the general attitude towards archery (or tournaments). That's why pretty much everyone ignored him on those matters and got away with it.
It did reflect general attitude. Tournaments were seen as a major problem and part of what is been in historiography called as "noble violence". And there were constant attempts to curb it eventually contributing to appearance of the Crusades, as they were seen as an effective instrument to direct destructive energies of early feudal Western European nobility to something constructive.
You need to remember that those early tournaments were not highly ritualized duels in to which they eventually evolved in later medieval eras. They were basically small battles often between teams of nobles and their retainers in the course of which participants were often killed and whole villages of bystanders burned down.