Archery in this game kind of sucks.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Icelander

This is a game, so if your character spends the points to be superhuman, he can be. But if you just spend the points to be a human archer, you can't shoot through metal armour, any more than your character can walk on water or through walls.

Archery is useful at range, but at melee ranges, normal people draw melee weapons. If you don't want that, spend points on archery-adjacent superpowers, like Heroic Archer, Weapon Master (Bow), etc.

I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that baseline GURPS actually makes archery more effective than it is in real life...

Same sort of reason it's so hard to make an unarmed build that can match armed melee or any kind of melee build that does well against firearms... luckily there are things in the GURPS toolkit that can make these things work... if the campaign is set up like that.