archers still firing while engaged in melee

[Double A]

I was fighting some heavily armored archers in a siege in THERA (but that mod forum's 95% dead so imma post here). My men started swording them in the face, but the archers refused to respond in kind. They continued to arrow my men in the face. As this enabled all of them to attack, my guys took a lot more casualties than I would've liked. My dudes also largely had about 3 to 10 armor+shield, while the archers had about 7 missile attack, and 6 melee attack to their mid-teens defense. It was not cool.

Is there any way to force enemy archers to draw their swords so they'll stop murdering my men? I'm pretty sure I've seen this bug outside of THERA.

[Double A]

Yep basically every archer in this mod is doing that.

[Gronndar]

This might not be so helpful, but I remember that I had in this happening, don't remember if it was vanilla, SS or other mod, but it was my archers which did this on the walls. Only the most "outer" archers went in melee, while others continued to fire. When more enemies closed in, they went in melee.

[SRACon17]

I'm not sure though, but I think putting archers on guard mode does that. At least I always put them on guard mode because I think that causes them to still fire after while some of them are engaging in melee. I don't know if I read that somewhere or not.

[Silverheart]

Usually when archers continue to fire despite having been engaged, it works if you simply tell your soldiers to push onward, so that more of them are in direct contact with your soldiers. If it´s your own archers doing this, though, it´s only a good thing.
Usually when I have archers on walls, I always order them to keep firing even if engaged in melee with enemies. This allows the ones in the back to still be useful, and they can rack up a bunch of kills that way, making them much better at holding the wall.
Like the stakes of longbowmen, I don´t think this is cheating, but rather exploiting game mechanics. Also, why wouldn´t you want the ones in the back to keep firing IRL?
In a real battle, it would make more sense for only the ones in front to fight in melee, with the rest of the band continuing to fire over their heads or beside them.

[Deepstrike101]

It's a... "Feature" more so than a bug.

Like others have mentioned, putting a unit of archers into a deep formation on guard mode will enable the rear ranks to continue to loose arrows at the enemy.

Why this is Good
-It allows the archers in the rear to actually do what they are supposed to rather than be simple sword fodder in this situation.
-Archers in the back continuing to loose is more realistic. In real life, when an archer several ranks off is fighting that doesn't mean you should stop what you are doing because you are a "unit."
-Makes archers a bit more useful as they can't just be negated by a 5 man unit of peasants.
-Good feature for mods with low missile damage and range, like Stainless Steel.

Why this is Bad
-Members of a unit can shoot strait through each others, which allows them to pump out a lot of arrows at the unit they are engaging and allows archers to take such deep formations.
-In vanilla and most mods ranged damage is hilariously overpowered compared to real life.

How to Counter it
-Keep telling your men to run through the archer ranks so they end up intermixing with the enemy ranks (Shield wall can help!).
-Attack them from behind so the rear ranks have to fight too.
-Cavalry is good at rushing through archer ranks if you tell them to travel through the archers.