The best kite defense is ranged weapons. The best way to have an AI react to kiting is to have it regroup after 2-3 rounds of not reaching its target. The best magic to counter kiting is to cast haste on the kited unit. allowing it to reach the target, or stop the target with Slow, Freeze, Stinking Mud, etc. The best traits to counter kiting would be a sprint ability, attacks that stun or prevent movement (ranged and melee), bonuses to movement for rogue and cavalry heroes. The best weapons to counter kiting would be nets, webs, Bolas (please, please, please!), drugged darts, arrow to the knee, throwing hammer, etc. Hope that helps. 

Well, you have code that increases the size of the tactical map on initiation based on the size of the armies involved, right?

How about as units get killed off in a battle, the number of usable tiles decreases, until it's so small that if it became a 1 on 1, it would necessarily turn into a melee (if there were melee units involved.)

I agree with this

If your champion gets 3 moves for every 1 the monster gets, why shouldn't you be able to outdistance him?

Another solution, then: Archer units may not shoot more than 6 times in any tactical combat.

The benefit of the Horse Archer would be that you could Kite-Kite-Kite (run out of arrows) and retreat.

True, but with high initiative heroes, it doesn't matter that you reduce their movement (apparently).

Other than making (those with high initiative) slowly bleed off that initiative (assuming move away + attack -aka archers-) until it reaches a reasonable level.

However ... alternatives (which work well with other movement-ideas I've suggested) is for ranged units to have a 'range' to their weapons, and maybe to lose a movement (or a turn, even) after kiting.

However, if the armies really ARE that lopsided ... why should kiting be removed? I mean, you can kite with magic ... why not kite with bows?

Maybe have a limited number of ranged attacks, and be able to 'pay mana' to "refill that arrow pouch"?

One tweak that might help is archers suffer penalties to damage/accuracy if they moved this turn or last turn (or possibly even the turn before that). The idea is that archers are most effective when they hold their ground, once they break and run they need to time to regroup and size up their targets.

Being able to move your full distance and still get a shot off doesn't really make sense to me.  Think about if the battle was taking place real-time: whenever you pause to shoot, your opponent would be gaining ground on you. What we have though is a situation where if the units have the same movement and initiative, the archer can run and shoot every turn, and the other guy will never get any closer.  This would only make sense if the archer could run faster, but that is not the case in looking at initiative and movement.

We'll the usual response is to limit the number of shots per battle by archers. While that sort if makes sense its also feels slightly forced when its  an extremely low number. What archer only carries 10 arrows?

Quiver Items could determine the number of shots an archer might get per round. Larger ones decreasing movement more, being heavier.

So with a smaller quiver Kiting is viable.. but only for 5 or 10 shots.

Alternatively they could simply lose some accuracy for each move in a round.

Or monsters with better piercing defense...

TBH though.. unless archery got a complete overhaul in the newer versions.. its so weak this should be a non issue by mid to late game.

Still just slows it down.

My solution: lower initiative gap between units and everything said in first response by Seanw3

kiting is a legitimate strategy and easily blockable. If your ranged and faster than the enemy you should be able to kite.  Have the AI prevent it strategically by never bieng without their own ranged units/fast units/spells (shouldn't anyway) and don't let mid-high lv champions have 3 attacks per regular troops 1.

This is nice.  An archer unit could move up to (tacmove - 1) and still fire, but if they move they get -50% acc on the shot.  If they move their full tacmove, they cannot shoot, or maybe get -90% acc on the shot.

I can't see a way to justify limiting speed/initiative on say a horse archer.  Limiting ammo as Heavenfall suggests ala MoM seems like the best option.

Yes, there should indeed be counters to fast units. Yet I think that many, if not most, of these counters already exist.

Also, everything counters itself.

I think the main focus here is to have, say, an all archer army not always beat an all melee army.

but A) I just don't see bows being strong enough to do this, no matter how useful kiting is

and B ) An all archer army should always devastate all melee ... until the melee catch up with em

I think the concept of not being able to Kite a very slow unit would be bad ... unless the unit doing the kiting is just stupidly OP.

I do not want archers to be either too weak or too strong, but I don't mind a hero-archer kiting a big scary monster as long as it does not happen under normal Warfare-with-Faction conditions.