I’m thinking specifically of turks, who only have normal skirmisher (less attack, less bonus attack, less hp, less range, less pierce armor than elite) or others who don’t have thumb ring and bad blacksmith.
The only answer I came up with is scout cav, because its available in feudal (having 2 pierce armor and 6 at max upgrades). Onagers are expensive a.f. and only come in castle.
Hussars, Knight-line, Onager are all good archer counters. Occasionally some UUs like Ghulam or Huskarl.
The Scout line is naturally good against archers and the Turkish ones are even better.
Turks have very strong scout line (+1 armor does a lot; it reduces the damage taken in castle age from 3 to 2 and in imp from 4 to 3). As for other civs that lack some upgrades: As long as you have the elite upgrades (which all civs apart from turks have) and at least bracer OR ring archer armor, you’re fine. Thumb ring does not matter for skirms (they don’t get attack speed, and are at 90% accuracy even without TR), so there are really no too many civs that dont get usable skirms.
In castle age, all civs have enough BS upgrades to make skirms work. In Imp, additional options are Paladin, UUs, Onagers, Siegeram+X, HCA and hussar (if gold is starting to run dry; hussar wont be cost effective vs massed arb).
Everybody always forgets about the good old Watch Towers 
There are lots of ways to deal with Archersin comparison to Cavalry. The prib easiest for unexperienced players are just defences.
Castles > Towers > TCs > Walls > Buildings
With the Range indicator mod these days it has become even easier to make a useful base layout wit your defences. Just make sure there is no “uncovered” path in your defence the opponent could use to dive. This forces him to stay outside and all he can get is an occasional pickof of a Vill that went a bit too far from the defences.
But then ofc you still have Siege,Scouts and Knights and last but not least Skirmishers.
Skirmishers are usually added in these two situations:
A) It’s an archer civ mirror
B) Your opponent has added Spears or Pikes to his Archers. You tank the arrowfire and pick off the Spears so your Cavalry can jump on the Archers.
As Turks you can go (free) light cav or hussar with Jans behind. Jans actually trade really well in even numbers vs archers, especially if there is a meat shield.
Turks are interesting. They are strong against archers early but weaker later.
This is in contrast to Goths – they are actually pretty bad against archers early on.
Scorpions are pretty good too – they don’t need a lot of upgrades. They even got buffed and has more pierce armor than mangonel
???
Turks are better than average vs archers late game purely because Hussar is a spammable unit and they get +1 PA compared to FU Hussar. FU Hussar is already decent and Turks get better than that.
Goths early game get FU Skirmishers until Castle Age, they get Mangonels, they get generic towers, they get FU Knights in Castle Age.
If Turks are bad vs Archers, then many other civs like Huns, Mongols and more are, too.
Those civs got usable (not FU, but usable) skirms. Turks dont.
I agree that hussar are a decent answer to archers unless in a ###### ### saying that they can fully replace the lack of skirms is highly debatable.