I see the thing like this:
- A good portion of all archers plays archer because they don't want to play infantry
- Motivating (= not forcing) those people to fight in melee will most likely fail, and they will run nonetheless
- As you apparently can't make archers stand and fight in melee, perhaps you can make infantry stop running after archers
- infantry players, like all the other classes as well, need to kill every enemy on the map in order to win, including archers and those pesky horse archers. Which means they MUST go after archers sooner or later
=> Problem
Points where you can tackle the problem:
Motivating the archers instead of forcing them to fight: Solution would be to NOT motivate but simply to force them, but I guess this is not what archers want, because it would ALWAYS have to end at a point where the archer is slower than the infantryman, or completely disabled another way when chased by infantry. Bad.
Stopping infantry of running after archers: the solution would be to not have infantry chase archers, which would mean that no kiting would take place anyway, even if technically possible. But the only way to achieve this would be to remove the requirement of killing everyone to win the game => dump battle mode.
What to replace battle mode with?
You probably have guessed my opinion: conquest moad