I almost never pick indirect range. It's just much easier to find a hill. Extra protection, no obscured vision. There are some situations where indirect range makes sense: forested flat lands, for example. Then I give this promotion to 1 or 2 units.
It's the same with amphibious. I don't usually want amphibious promotions for my melee, but in some maps, it's useful to have 1 or 2 units able to cross those rivers.
AI sometimes surprise me by taking proper promotions for the situation.
I agree this scenario you describe is often ideal; but now we're narrowing this into a somewhat specific set of conditions that are not truly always available. Regardless, in your scenario, I'm imagining we're talking about defending a choke point or other strategic location.. ignoring w/e melees might be necessary, I'd maybe want a second archer w/ similar promos to relieve/flank the hill defender, and after that I'd want up to 3 range/indirects, for 3/5 of my ranged units holding this area taking that combo. This might be too congested, especially if no roads, so say 2/4 archers as range indirect.. this'll work way better than having 4/4 logistics path range units trying to hold this point, in this engineered scenario. Add in the variety of terrain that you often have in front of our imagined hill, and the range indirect becomes more useful.. even better than the single hill, if you can find a series of hills now to slow AI units especially horses, your indirect range will hit as often as your 2-shot logistics archer, who you'll often be shuffling around.... This unit mix will also transition to hit cities better on counter attack after grinding down the spam. Granted this is a bit of a castle defense strategy, and exploitable by other human attackers, I find myself setting up this way often enough when playing tall, with good success.
Gazebo's AI can successfully assault the chokepoint sometimes, at least to push the front line back a tile or two... I've never been pushed back by AI once I have even one range/indirect in place, though, all other things being equal (yes sure bombers etc but I get those too) and usually I can grind xp on range/indirect every turn, provided I have at least 2 neighbours to alternate for war weariness, whereas my other archers can't always hit from shorter, uncovered range w/o serious risk. I have no problem with the range/indirect effect itself necessarily (although it is strange on some level to think of these archers firing over say, the alps, to hit targets as far away as the most elite modern battleships.. but I realize the realism issue is another sore point on these boards lol.. I try to imagine that they scale the mountain just enough, fire, and return to their assigned position in the interim between turns to rationalize things here); but I don't like that the AI never uses this feature, even ineffectively, against me. In practice this setup seems to only be truly useable by human, whereas somehow or other most of the other strong combos show up on AI here and there.
Anyway I can appreciate that a specific "fix" to this promo combo might not be to the community's taste, and the feedback on other's playstyles in this regard has been helpful as I tweak my mod mod for the next house game here.
G, if you're reading, I wonder if you've ever considered slower xp on marathon, and/or asymmetrical xp rates for human/AI on deity??? would these even be possible? best ideas from this thread so far I think...
