It’s clear you put a lot of time and thought into your position, but I (respectfully) think your main premise is flawed. Your two arguments seem to be that skirmishers are (1) too food-heavy to counter a unit that doesn’t cost food, thereby delaying castle/imp times; and (2) that skirmishers trade poorly vs enemy archers when the enemy outmicros the skirmisher player.
(1) To address your 1st point: If one player goes archers and the other goes scouts, and neither player’s eco becomes too damaged by enemy military, my money is on the scout player reaching castle first nearly every time (even though scouts cost a whopping 80 food). The scout player’s eco is geared towards a food-heavy early feudal where he/she has 4-5 more villagers gathering food which the archer player has on gold. If one were to replace the scout production with skirmishers, only 3 villagers on food are needed to pay for the cost of a skirmisher, and you don’t even need constant production to match the opponent’s archer numbers because skirmishers (a) beat archers 1-on-1 AND (b) produce more quickly, so right there you’ve got 2-3 more food vills ABOVE those required to recoup the food cost of the skirm. That’s a recipe for a faster castle with skrims, not a slower one.
(2) The scenario you’ve described where the skirmishers die to the archer units (or cav archer) sounds to me like you’re being outmicroed. Skirmishers are the only mainline counter unit that actually beats their target gold unit 1-on-1. Ideas like making them ignore rams when no other unit in the game does that, or giving them bonus damage vs archer units in addition to their impressive pierce armor is silly. Skirmishers, when used correctly, do not need those buffs in the slightest. They’re a cost-effective unit that strikes fear into the heart of all archer civs and are capable of doing a tremendous amount of damage when used as a support unit. They are not designed to be a primary attacking unit because that’s the point of gold units, not counter units. Skirmishers counter their target opponent better than any other counter unit, and they’re subsequently more vulnerable to the units they don’t counter than any other unit. The more I think about it, the more I think the skirmisher is perfectly balanced and well-designed, and that your issue with them stems more from how you use them than from their intrinsic shortcomings.
tldr - don’t change the skirmisher!
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I’m a huge fan of that tech, makes skirms good even against knights! Plus it’s cool to watch 
Really? You know that Archers deal actually more dps to other archers than skirms deal to archers?
You know that with fletching archers kill a vill in 14 hits (minimum 28 s) while skirms need 5 hits to kill an archer (which takes 15 s minimum). This leads to the odd behaviour that archers under skirm fire can “trade” cost efficiently by just killing some vills. (Vills in feudal are extremely valueble, but also in castle age because of the high cost of TCs, that make almost 40 % of their total cost)
I don’t have much fear of enemy skirms if I play archers. I know that if I am in the eco I get good trades even if i am “caught” and if I encounter them on open field I can just retreat without losing much and have several options: Go up to the next age and upgrade. Make some scouts to counter the skirms. Make my own skirms as I already have the buildings for it and often a better civ (yeah archer civs usually have also better skirms than non-archer civs) to make that unit.
Because of the food cost skirms are actually also not “cheaper” in feudal than archers. It’s about the same cost all things considered.
Skirm micro in unit comps is extremely demanding. Only the very best players in the world can do it while not losing on other, even more important parts of the game.
I doubt more than 5-10 people in this forum ever target microed skirms in a unit comp, cause that’s demanding and not even that much revarding as other micro as (as I explained above) the dps of skirms even against the units they are supposed to “counter” is actually even lower than if you would use archers. That’s why players like Liereyy don’t even use skirms as they are so good in dodging enemy archer shots that they kill the enemy archers faster with their own archers than skirms.
Ok we can’t do that, but it actually showcases that weird phenomenom caused by the skirms actually dealing less damage to archers than archers deal to themselves.
Skirm micro is extremely challenging and not even that much revarding, so I wouldn’t blame anybody in sucking at this. It’s a well known fact that skirms don’t work against mid- or lategame unit comps anymore. (Exception is ofc xbow + pike but once the opponent adds some siege it’s usually also over with the skirms)
So the proposed change would adress it somehow.
But I also think, that the targeting micro of the skirms actually should be kept. It revards the few players who put the work into the skirm micro. So in the end I am somewhat torn about that proposal (or similar ones like “intelligent auto targeting”. I think it could make the unit more usable for the majority of the players. But I don’t like it would take away that special kind of micro.
In my eyes it would be better if skirm micro would be more revarding with higher bonus damage, then maybe more players would be encouraged to learn it.
(One thing I also want to mention is the big difference of ROF is a big advantage for the archers against skirms as after the skirms fired it gives the archer player a nice time window where they can’t be damaged. Good players can exploit that to get favorable trades that can’t be answered during that time. It also leads to possibly less overkill when playing with higher numbers of units.)
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I need to correct myself.
After some testing I figured out that it wouldn’t make sirm micro easier or more revarding if the bonus damage was increased.
Instead I would propose a higher ROF.
The problem is the Overkill with higher bonus damage. Better have less overkill but more “pick offs”.
In the exchange Skirms could lose 1 pierce armor. Against (most) melee units they are quite bad anyways so it wouldn’t make that much of a difference there.
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But the purpose of them is to be used against ranged units! And vs pikes as a band-aid, that’s all. Removing pierce armor would make them useless, making them attack faster would make them OP vs archer units.
It’s good for skirmishers to be able to focus on archers as much as possible and for archers to be at a disadvantage when fighting in-range of those skirmishers rather than ignore skirmishers for the sake of killing cost effective units the skirmishers are supposed to protect. It’s better if it’s preferred to fight skirmishers or run away rather than just killing the units around the skirms while ignoring the skirms alltogether. More often I’d hazard a guess running away would be the go-to option.
That would make Skirms easier to micro, and make archer micro against skirms more difficult. Maybe change ROF from 3 to 2.
However their overall DPS should not be changed IMO. So to keep this balance they would need to have base damage reduced from 3 to 2, bonus damage to archers from 4 to 3, and bonus damage to spearmen from 3 to 2. The effect would just be easier micro, less overkill, less punishing if an enemy dodges your shot, and a slight damage increase to high-PA targets like rams (always take 1 damage, but now take it more often).
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Increase bonus damage, decrease base damage so the dps is better vs archers yet remains similar vs melee? as well as change the rate of fire to be faster for quicker pick-offs vs archers
I think this would be too much as this would lead to skirmishers being better against some “archer counters” than archers themselves (Huskarl eg).
I think there should be something int he middleground like 2.5 or whatever that makes more sense.
Whilst I would prefer to set it off by reducing the pierce armore (so “underupgraded” skirms also could perform reasonably against archers) I could also see an ofset in damage output per shot working there.
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Skirms as units with their stats are fine. The Problem is, that they cost food, need an archery range and take the archer upgrades from blacksmith. This combination forces cav and infantry civs into a heavy investment away from their “road” in feudal, if the opponent goes archer, resuulting in a later CA time and an Overall diadvantage, that carries the archer player to win. Thats the thing, that makes archers meta. If games reaches imperial, gold gets rare and food is trash and two of the three trash units are reasonable and cheap counters against archers.
If skirms are made stronger, it would not solve the base problem and make archer civs garbage in late.
The solutions would be a wood only cost for skirms, or transforming them into an infantry unit, that is made in barracks and draws their blacksmith improvements from the melee attack and the infantry armor lines (its strange anyway, that a spear thrower benefits from arrow Upgrades or bracer).
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In the early game, if you have the defense upgrade and more than two skirms they won’t be microed down. You can micro with skirms also just as well as with archers.
In hindsight, skirms should probably have been made moving faster but more fragile, but it’s too late to balance around that now.
aoe2 is an economy-focused game and the selling point of archers is that you barely need food for them. For this reason they have several powerspikes thoughout the game and skirms can stop these.
It’s also a game revolving around gold units and against archer civs, getting skirms scales very well. In the mid-to lategame you shouldn’t rely on only skirms the same way you don’t rely on only pikes most of the time. You have other counters to archers in siege, enough knights/scouts, defensive buildings…
Honestly I don’t really see the problem, skirms are not useless so it looks like you are just dissatisfied with the role they play.
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I actually see it the opposite way around.
I think the skirms should actually be slightly slower than archers like pikes are slower than knights.
But I agree that they should have higher dps against archers (better rof) but more fragile.
I think that is a good way to design the counter units, that they trade well against the units they shall counter but can’t force the engagement. Ofc key is that it is in a good relation - with our current micro skills spears are atm just too slow against the units they are supposed to counter. It’s too easy to just run around in circles and damage the eco of the opponent even with a lot of spears chasing you.
This seems smart. Or at least try partially shifting some wood cost to food. 45w + 15f maybe? I do like the concept of wood only skirms, just might be safer to test the change in smaller increments.
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Agree, I think it would definetely benefit the game if the trash units would have more destinct wood/food ratios. It’s a question of commitment, the gold units also need very different eco setups.
But it should come with a small buff to the trash counter units at the same time, just a little bit to restore them to their intended state, to make it a bit more revarding also for players with less experience to play them.
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