When you are boomed, you can spam any trash unit mindlessly. Hussars are easier to spam over long term.
There are a few general ideas with infantry, and I’ll copy one of my older comments about that here:
But let’s get specific to pikes. There’s micro and counter-micro. Here’s the important bit: It is (almost) never worth it for cavalry units to pull back and re-engage, unless the conditions change. This is assuming no wacky stuff like coustillier’s charge attack, and a modest number of units (say, 10-15) on both sides. Why is this? Because pikes/halbs have a longer delay between each attack, and each attack will do a lot of damage.
In practice, the cavalry player can do two things. One, add in more units and two, heal up their units. So, let’s start with early-mid castle age. At this point, pros will pull back their low HP knights, and get them healed. If you are using pikes, you need to focus micro. i.e, target one knight with 4-5 pikes. Each pike hit will do 24 damage to knights, which have 120 HP. Which means, 5 is the exact number you need. I am talking about like 10 pikes vs 5-10 knights here.
Now, this being said, no good cavalry player will just push their cavalry into halbs. So, you have the three main counters. Archers/HC/Skirms, Siege(Onagers, and scorpions), and other infantry units. The first two require their own types of micro, while you need to just pull back with the last one. Rapid formation change is good against skirms, while you need something way more complicated against siege. I have linked a clip above of Viper taking down onagers with halbs.
Yeah, so pikes counter them. They are cavalry, so pikes counter them. Simple as that.
They have less bonus than foot archers. Which is also the same as buildings.
Foot archers have very low HP. Crossbows have 35, while arbs have 40. They also have 0 base pierce armour. On top of all that, they aren’t even that fast like cav archers. This makes them surprisingly weak to even units like halbs, if they are few enough, and you don’t micro them well. The numbers pan out such that you need a small bonus for archers to decisively beat halbs, as they should.
It’s interesting that you mention that. Pikes and Arbs are weak to the same unit, Skirms. Right now, archers have a great counter, skirms. However, hussars are also a soft counter right now, under the right circumstances. I don’t think that’s needed, or good.
You don’t balance the game around one civ. You can just give turks something else to deal with arbs.