If shield inf have same movement speed out of shield wall, as archers, it would sound like that they would never catch them. But, actually they will. Because of several things. First, archers need to stop entirely to make damage. And then inf can go into shield wall and still close in. Can we agree on that inf in a shield wall, still have 700% more movement speed, compared to archers that stands still ? Secondly, the inf need to use the terrain to corner those archers, and then they are caught! And if one group of inf, can make one group of archers run and stop making damage, then they actually counter each other out. I am not saying it will be easy to catch them with 1.4.x rules. But does it have to be easy? I remember 1.4.x archers and inf very well. And it was the greatest pleasure to finally catch those freaking running archers, and kill them 1v1 with inf! Even with 5x2h and 1xcav vs 6x archers we managed to catch and kill them, because we used Tactics! Today, I don't see archers as any real threat really. Our cav mostly do rambooing, because our inf can manage on our own. Do you really want this game to be a meta of shields in square form around flag, while they can go afk untill a morale win, because they are invincible?
No but you're talking about archers being solo all the time. Archers are not made to be solo or self sustained, they need good positioning and support units to protect them, the only strength heavy archer units should have is alot of damage from a long distance and nothing else really because doing massive damage from far away is a super perk on its own. If we're talking about light archers like the hunters, sure they should be able to outrun heavy infantary easy but they still shouldn't be able to outrun light infantary. Because they in the end the meta will become archers if they are the fastest units, there will rarely be any reason to take a slow unit that will never be able to come to melee range with anything except other infantary that are running towards them.
Also I never said that infantary should be faster than archers in shieldwall just when they leave shieldwall should they be able to outrun archers. Also shield units already gets beaten by two handers so I dont know why square formation and morale win would become meta just because they would have a chanse to catch archers, it would more likely be like that if they cant catch the archers so they just have to stand and wait, why chase something you know you cant catch.