Feudal defensive towers?
Anyway I don’t get your logic: you say you want to emphazise its raiding role, but your changes are almost against that. Gold doesn’t matter that much in Castle and 45 is already much lower than the knight’s 75, even +1 damage from skirmishers/archers would make it inferior to scout cavalry, and an even lower fire rate would give more time for villagers to escape.
I personally don’t use watch/guard towers or see people use them (pros also say they’re inefficient, not to mention stationary). Otherwise no need for light cavalry upgrade and you only need 6 SLs attacking a villager at once to kill it (5 with forging) and the extra range makes that very easy, so the attack rate is no big deal in raiding.
The gold reduction mostly helps in imp, yeah. But with a group of 8 of them you have saved 120 gold compared to now (and 360 compared to knights) that’s nothing to scoff at and its way cheaper on food compared to light cav.
It’s true. But watch towers are still good to defend vs archers or towers in feudal and the enemy might have one in Castle. But anyway I don’t feel like SL need to be nerfed against ranged attacks. They are already like the second weakest cav to archers (cataphract hold better but are too expensive to be wasted like that)
Knights don’t need light cav upgrade either and only need to be 4 to 1 shot a vill. They cost in total 240 food and 300 gold, while 6 SL cost 420 food 270 gold ( 180 with your change). That +1 range and this saved gold arenn’t worth the food equivalent of 3,5 villager, at a time of the game where you start producing villies from several TCs. Also while the even lower firing rate wouldn’t matter that much with 6 SL (it still does), it would definitely make your first SL less effective (since usually you don’t want your units doing nothing), and would make them even weaker to spearmen. And I have no idea why you want to make them take bonus damage from skirmishers of all things on top that. Yes they can avoid javelins, but any other cav can do it as well without getting punished if the enemy still manages to hit…
I don’t get why you want to nerf the normal SL’s stats. Do you feel like they are too good at raiding currently?
Basically your changes would be a buff only once Elite Steppe lancer is researched (and only against civs with bad archers), and a nerf for any use in Castle.
You defently build more than 4 knights when making a raiding party, especially since melee unit pathing is very wonky, you practically need to surround the vills one at a time to one-shot them with knights. That extra range and move speed that the SL has makes it so much easier. So yes, I think the SL is a better raiding unit and with the gold reduction, you can make do with 2-3 less gold miners (this is a buff!).
The archer weakness thing I try to sell is that it gives them counterplay, again their 1range gives them the ability to attack with more of them at a time which makes them sometimes better against archers than even knights, this makes it dangerous to dive in on archers which should be their weakness.
I think the purpose of SL should be more aggressive than the knight-line and more fragile while facing arrows. Maybe increase the rate of fire is a good choice. So people can use SL for rushing the rival and use knights to defend the base.
Just give every units their own duty.
SL should be SL. It shouldn’t be something that’ll replace role by any means.
Make this light unit to become strong in crowd. This is probably the best way to handle. It will beat Knight in large number but should be defeated by Knights in 1v1.
I still think 
no cavalry should be so great in choke points or cornered to a wall.
Also attackin over walls is also strange.
Yeah the famous joke of the steppe lancer being good in chokepoint. For the whole attacking over walls thing sure it’s weird, but all ranged units can already shoot with 100% accuracy targets hidden behind wall they shouldn’t be able to see, or still fire if they are just against a wall.
Hehe, agreed. At least they can shoot over walls… Imagine a really long curved spear to poke someone over the wall 
shooting over a wall makes a heck of a lot more sense than poking them with a cavalry lance…
Just put yourself in front of a wall and then get as close as possible. Do you think that if you had a bow you could fire that way?
Viper proves in this video https://youtu.be/MXkLdfV5CBQ what I was saying.
Steppe lancers are OP raiding units, way better than scouts for someone who said the scouts are almost as good for no gold.
He is raiding so many vils with just 2-4 lancers… These are great units guys. Stop trying to buff them up again until they are broken.
Yeah for a player that makes 500 clicks per minute. What about us? Casual to intermediate players.
The amount of actions per minute you need for any other stable unit doesn’t change for steppe lancers. So yeah you wont get as much value out of 2 steppe lancers as viper does but you can still make like 4-6 of them very quickly with low resources and go raiding.
That is correct, still why is there an elite upgrade if its viable only as raiding.? I guess this kind of raiding isn’t usabl later on?
Side note: why is he clicking randomly all arround without doing anything?
lancers were used to break infantry, so maybe give them a bonus against spear line?
I had an idea; what if you could build a ‘steppe scout’ in the feudal age? Basically equivalent to a scout cavalry, but with the ability to upgrade to a steppe lancer in the castle age and get a nice power spike.
The lancer itself would still need a slight buff, maybe +1 damage, but it wouldn’t NEED to be comparable to the Knight to still be an effective choice.
remove knight from those civs that has sl and increase their speeds (not attack speed) and decrease its gold a bit and it should be fine. this way they can easily kill cav archers and conqs and can raid better than any unit in the game.
Since Cuman are balanced around getting Paladin I don’t think it’s possible
Nerf them a little more