I don’t mind a slow (and rare) unit like TK being able to two shot vills, but a generic stable unit, pls no 
At least you need a bunch of those to one shot a vill 
not just one unit riding around
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Lith paladin? It’s also already in the game.
Archers are also way cheaper and have bigger range. And steppe lancers cost a lot of food what makes it harder to go for them compared to (cav) archers.
And as I already said, I want them to 3-shot them, it’s only 1 shot less than atm. Of course it’s a buff, but it’s nothing like the coustilier.
there is nothing generic about the lithuanian paladins that can 2 shot workers. first it requires the paladin upgrade. which is rare in 1v1 situations. and is incredibly expensive.
secondly it requires 3 relics minimum. so good luck.
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Yeah, but that at least takes a bit of work to get
Indeed, logical that they are pretty good at taking out things like vills, but they’re also more vulnerabe to things like castle fire and siege
I just have not so good memories with the coustillier when it was new. The game was a dumb clickfest, just send coustilliers to eco, oneshot every will, try to quickwall your own vills in the meantime, it was just dumb
obviously some ways the unit was also funny, because the unit was also oneshotting archers, and cavalry archers, but that was due to a bug
Thats not an argument. Additional armor classes can easily be introduced.
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Aztec Champion called me. He was sad because no one remembers him!
Elite War Elephant have blocked me on WhatsApp too!
They literally created the Spearman armor class rather than giving it -2p armor (almost the same effects)!
Its quite different actually:
There are plenty of units that have a different number of bonus damage than +2 and Parthian tactics gives additional bonus damage.
It does matter for balancing
Same reason why the Fishing ship armor class is distinct from the Ship armor class, just so that fire galleys are worse at killing your water eco than they are with fighting ships.
If you get to this unit in 1v1 to the point where you are in the enemy eco, you deserve the win.
Parthian Tactics wasn’t a thing in AoK. They released Parthian Tactics and Spearman armor class together
step up its game by letting the lancer kill gaia and herdable units in one hit - from one step away. steppololo. new meme lol
The question is not “What is the Steppe Lancer’s role,” it’s “What is the Steppe Lancer’s role in Steppe civilizations.” Mongols, Cumans, and Tatars are the only civs with SL, all focus on light cavalry and cav archers, and have a weak early castle age but dominant late game.
Removing the Knight line is not an option because Steppe civs (with the exception of Cumans - but we’ll get to them in a second) would prefer not to go for knights long term anyways, they don’t scale as well as their other choices. Cumans get really solid Paladins, but they also get Steppe Husbandry, which reduces the construction time of ESL to iirc 10 seconds - 1/3 the time of a knight. Conscription lowers that even more… It’s nutty.
What all three civs lack is a worthy champion line. Mongols and Tatars would never want to go for champs, and while Cumans have decent ones (only lacking supplies), Kipchaks actually do everything a champion would except kill skirmishers.
So Steppe civs have two main weaknesses: poor heavy infantry and slow transition into their preffered unit. Therefore, the Steppe Lancers role should address these weaknesses: they should be good against skirms, eagles, and (with micro) against pikes; they should be able to be used as an intermediate unit to keep the enemy at bay while you get ready to produce your expensive cav archer army.
When we look at the unit design, the one thing that stands out to me is the creation speed: it’s far faster than any other cavalry - Elite even quicker. This is “Intermediate unit” role is clearly part of their intended design. They’re a sort of unit that you can flood, assuming you have the food in castle age or gold in imperial age.
tl;dr
Buffing their creation speed by 4 seconds (24s /20s elite → 20s/16s) and their gold cost to 30 would go a long way. Their role is population inefficient flood units which scale better with numbers. You reach castle age and produce 3 in the time it takes your enemy to make 2 knights. An all in, 1 TC Steppe Lancer play should be a viable strategy of overwhelming your opponent with sheer numbers in games where steppe civs are on the back foot. They’re not hard to beat for most units 1v1, but they’re awkward to take on due to their speed, cost, and creation rate. They should be light enough on your gold eco that you can throw them away in imp, where they are far more effective at quickly killing eco than hussar because their range lets them chase less (and you can always add in hussars later when you want units which persist in the enemy eco). Perhaps a +2 attack vs spearmen and eagles could be considered for ESL, but normal SL only need creation speed and cheaper cost for their role to become really apparent.
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What if we gave them extra melee range so you can be a sweaty micro nerd and win exchanges with them as their advantage? Kind of like how Mangos are simultaneously weak and strong to a pack of trash depending on how you micro it. The single extra range atm isn’t exactly allowing them to avoid damage realistically but if you gave them +2 or +3 you could hit and run and have them stand behind melee more effectively, giving them a niche.
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I think we should consider the role of the steppe lancers first.
The thing with the extra range gives them a unique utility - if you are able to mass them, they can basically beat everything:
Knights/Camels: Attacked from multiple lancers at once.
Halbs: can’t even engage because of the range.
Archers: Can be jumped on: stacking doesn’t give any advantage
Siege: can be sniped with mobility
Monks: too micro intensive/hard to click individual targets when stacked
The only ways to deal with them would be halb/siege. As the halbs would force them to stack, the siege could decimate them when stacking.
So the question is, do we want this in the game or do we want them to have utility?
Thing is, all the civs with steppe lancers also have cav archers which work out comparable: Weak in low numbers, almost no counter when massed. So the civs would have to decide individually to go for either of those. Two of the civs have also very strong cav archer UUs to go for.
So maybe the steppe lancer should have a different role?
Idea: Make them strong in sniping and chasing fleeig units. Instead of buffing them to a state where they concurr with the cav archers in terms of decision making, make them a utility unit. Higher speed, low attack speed (but short animation). The DPS could be held at the same level, but their health could be reduced, so they need to be cared about and can’t be chosen as main force cause of their weakness against ranged + meatshield then. But they could work well together with cav archers as they could be used to snipe siege and retreating enemies.
The other way around would make them just the melee version of the cav archer and therefore making them either OP or trash as they will always be compared to them.
So, the proposed Idea for a “utility” steppe lancer:
Hit Points: 45
Atk: 12
ROF: 3.2
Range: 2
Speed: 1.55
Elite
Hit Points: 60
Atk: 15
ROF: 3.2
Range: 2
Speed: 1.55
So the exchange would be higher speed and +1 range for less hp.
When mixed with knights they would still play basically the same role as atm and they could be used as a utility unit if mixed with cav archers. BUT they couldn’t be used as a main force anymore because of the comparable low hp, taking away the biggest problem for their balance.
At least he was created and mentioned something new about it. All ideas are welcomed and it’s not his fault if microsoft is not smart enough to fix this in time.
Well he could also just append his idea to one of the existing threads. Its also not really a new one. The idea of it replacing another cavalry line has been discussed many times before already. Anyways, the thing with the steppe lancer is that it is in such a weird place that people never agree on anything with it.
Some people just want to make minor changes, other people have big ideas of how to rework the unit to give it a new role, but in the end none of these ideas ever find an open ear in the rest of the community. Ive rarelly seen a fruitful discussion in any of these threads about someones concrete idea. People just throw out their own ideas which are then ignored by everyone else.
neither creative nor new. this idea has been thrown out in one form or another many times in the past.
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Pretty useless the discount on steppe lancer of the new update
Perhaps the best we can do is just let the SL be what is it. To accept it can’t have a unique enough role within the meta. The civs are already doing allright as they are right now. Let them stand as a meme unit for noobs to have fun. Let them be the missionaries of the steppe civs.
Its icon next to camels’ will serve as a reminder of what happens when new elements are introduced to the game just for the sake of trying to make something cool.
Or give them a utility instead of making them viable.
I think that’s the thing. The civs have insane cav archers. And steppe lancers have comparable gameplan applications. Weak in low numbers, almost unstoppable in high. Steppe lancers have basically no counter when massed, but it’s even harder to mass them than cav archers.
I think their role should be a support unit both for knight and cav archers. High damage output, fast, but fragile. In knight formations they give some extra punch. For cav archers they give siege sniping, breaking through walls and forcing fights, chasing enemy forces which try to back away.
Then the elite upgrade could be made cheaper, as it only serves as a support unit.
That’s my idea to "fix* them.