I don't know, I feel like the balance is almost right and if there are any problems, then xbows are not a part of it. I have no idea about the randoms (frankly, last time I checked the army combo used was not important because everyone plays Cursed and makes 100 towers each), but in our TS games xbows have their place in the games. It's very map dependent though, basically if you have enough space and enough xbows, they will kill a lot, especially when the enemy depends on knights and swordmen much. Of course, it's hard to push with crossbows, too, but I disagree that the unit is completely useless. If you're looking for such an unit, better think about scouts

Scouts have all the disadvantages of the units they remind of - just like with the knight, you need to produce a horse for it (making it very expensive), and like the axe, you get a unit that dies like a fly under bowmen fire

Knights are nice because they're good for dancing, flanking shooters and tanking; neither of which can a scout do... And axemen are cheap enough to be spammed; did you ever see someone spamming scouts? Look at the numbers in the scout challenge topic; even if someone makes 50 scouts at PT, they will all die as soon as someone shoots them... maybe their shield boost against shooters should be very powerful to make them equal to knights when getting shot, so they can be used for dancing? I don't think anyone ever had this idea...
Note: this game development is dead, don't expect too much to happen in this area. We need to wait a year or two and then we can start balancing the upcoming game from Krom
