New player, struggle against AI with skirmishers

I started playing AoE 2 DE a few days ago. I watched some guides and build orders. I picked the britons as my first civ and an archer build order. I only play vs AI to learn the mechanics. I can do good versus moderate but the hard AI always crushes me. I get into feudal before the AI and and can do some damage with my first archers, but then he just builds skirmishers and I lose. I know skirmishers are bad against pretty much else besides archers so I tried with spearmen since I’ll build them later anyways and I thought it would be better to build one food/wood unit and one gold/wood unit but the spearmen do barely nothing while the skirmishers kill all my archers. Then I tried men-at-arms, they can kill the skirmishers but they are so expensive I struggle with my economy.

So what’s the best way to counter skirmishers with the britons? Scouts? Even though britons don’t have a Good cavalry? Or stop building archers completely and switch to men-at-arms until castle age? Something else?