Of course, do whatever you want fam. I still recommend riding a horse just for the faster map speed, as there's nothing stopping you from getting off it once a battle starts.

FYI, all factions have some form of missile infantry. It's been a while so I might be wrong, but I think they can be summarized as:

The Vaegir Marksmen are the best bow archers in the game. They have more range and far better firing speed than the Rhodoks, but they aren't as armored and don't hit quite as hard as the Rhodok Sharpshooters. They are still my favorite missile unit in the game.

Nord archers kinda suck, but they are pretty tough for being so cheap.

Rhodoks have the best crossbowmen in the game, huge shields, much armor, and they hit very, very hard. Generally considered the best ranged unit in the game.

Swadians also have tough crossbowmen, but they aren't quite as good as the Rhodoks.

The Khergits also technically have missile infantry in their recruits. They are terrible. The next upgrade turns them into skirmisher cavalry.

Originally posted by OrderedChaos:

Best way to play as ground archer is to use nords or rhodoks as your melee troops, and vagirs or rhodoks as your archer troops. You can command your archers to stand near you, and command your infantry to stand between the archers and the enemy. Then command them to charge once the enemy is really close. If you're standing near your archers, you can keep an eye out to shoot cavalry which breaks through and attacks the archers. Your archers and you should be shooting the enemy infantry and the enemy archers a lot in the meantime,

If you spend time in the rhodok's region, then you don't have to worry about cavalry as much, and can focus on standing on top of hills and shooting everything. If you need to fight cavalry out in the open though, that's where the rhodok or nord infantry really start to help. rhodok spears can stop the cavalry usually. nord infantry are some of the most agile and fastest movers and attackers on foot in the game, so they do really well when enemy cavalry gets bogged down in your infantry line.

You probably need an emergency melee weapon for if enemy infantry break through to you too fast. I use one-handed sabres or scimitars because of their speed and because cut damage scales really high with power strike. If you aren't strong or fast on foot yet, I've found that the iron rods help a lot (about as fast as a quarterstaff, and enough blunt damage to kill some of the medium tier units and bandits you normally fight), The one-handed scimatars are much nicer for speed and damage once you're strong enough though.

Finally, if you want to avoid the pain of early game when you suck at the bow, get around it faster by choosing the character creation things which give you strength and power shot:
https://mountandblade.fandom.com/wiki/Character_creation
Male
Hunter
Steppe child (or Page i guess)
Poacher
Revenge

Also keep in mind that the two skills you need are Power Draw and Weapon Mastery. Weapon Mastery lets you accumulate more skill, speed, and damage with the bow slowly over time as you use it. Power Draw should be the main focus until you get up to power draw 7 or 8, then get weapon mastery as high as you can. This is assuming you want to get your own skill very high, but it would neglect party skills and INT if you do this.

If you want the strongest ground archer character, then you want to focus only on STR up to about 24, then AGI up to high 20s (30 max), then finish STR up to 30. Get power draw as high as you can along this growth, and then max out weapon mastery as soon as possible. pick up athletics and power strike when you have spare points to spend (for survival)

If you want the most balanced party leader archer, then get STR to around 24 and AGI around 18-21, and then some INT for rounding out some party skill bonuses. Then circle back to STR as high as possible

Thank you very much for this. This is amazing information.