Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

Best defense for me has always been to charge in and melee. If they're busy trying to hit you, they're not thinking about your buildings or animals. Archery is not nearly as strong in this game as people want to believe it is.

Bows are completely busted in this game. Granted, I'd still recommend running outside your base when shooting enemies during a raid, as that should prevent enemies from attacking your base directly, but archery is insanely overpowered.

The main reason for this is because not only do you have higher damage and less stamina costs, but you also have a higher firerate at higher Bow levels, meaning even more damage and even less stamina. Your DPS increases like six times at Bow 100 over Bow 0.

And here's an example to show the insane stamina decrease. A fully-charged bow shot with a Crude Bow at Archery 0 costs around eight stamina. A fully charged bow shot with Draugr Fang at Archery 85 costs around eight stamina (and that's not counting the stamina decrease with the Archery skill). Every other weapon category gets considerably more expensive on Stamina the better the weapon tier; the Blackmetal Knife uses three times more stamina than the Flint Knife and costs the same amount of stamina as Frostner to swing, despite Frostner doing considerably more damage than the Blackmetal Knife per hit.