Tora i also like the map archers, it is pretty interesting unit-control wise.
Chop till you drop mad, a chop equivalent of archers, puts more pressure on mining gold and flanking with big armies, whereas in archers we haz interesting micro aspects with small groups of units as well as big ones.
The biggest problem with archers is, in my opinion, its shitty community. Most of the people are weak-ass one mappers which made AO their religion and take it very personally when they lose. The others (gowers, choppers) are not exactly appealed by the map. So basically we have a very narrow community consisting of AO one mappers (bad players) and all-around players (usually very dangerous, e.g: DreamerJosh, Greenplastic, swift, lone, claw), but these are small numbers nonetheless...