Step Lancers are broken - totally imbalanced

[letmepickthis]

They either need to slightly nerf them and become the Tatar UU or heavily nerf them and make them available to all steppe civs. This would then prompt a nerf to all these steppe civs.

Giving a common unit to only 2 civs is dumb but giving it to some but not all steppe civs is even dumber.

They are too afraid to touch any of the vanilla civs but these civs were created before the more “creative” units and bonuses. I think it’s ok to make these old civs work with the new units for consistency. They would only be marginally different which is ok. You can’t expect the original civs to stay exactly the same when the game has changed so much in the last 20 years.

[Polo88kai]

Just add some ‘attack delay’ to Steppe Lancers like Cavalry Archers and Mamelukes which need a few moment to shoot, it supposed to balance the kiting ability of ranged unit with fast speed, but the Cumans breaks the rule. (SL & Kipchak’s fast shooting)

• Civilization and Unit Balance Changes
• Balance Changes for the Cumans and Steppe Lancer

They announced an update in next week, let’s see what will happen.

[pitius2k13]

Among many other civ in the history, Hungarians used SL quite a lot till the end of 17th century. So SLs to be added to a wider range of civ.

[MasterSncKnight]

I agree with making SL available to most civs, it’s not an UU since more than one civ has access to it and I think it should be made by others civs AFTER getting some nerf to put it in its place.
I also think that for balance purposes some civs shouldn’t have access to the elite SL but still have access to the normal SL.

[GMEvangelos]

AS AN UPDATE: Steppe Lancers received an update in the recent December Update (34055):

• Steppe Lancer: Decreased the attack power from 10 to 8 melee damage.
• Elite Steppe Lancer: Decreased the attack power from 12 to 10 melee damage.
• Steppe Lancer [Standard & Elite]: Increased the gold cost to train the unit from 30 to 45 gold.
• Steppe Lancer [Standard & Elite]: Slowed the rate of fire from 1.9 to 2.3 seconds.
• Steppe Lancer [Standard & Elite]: Decreased the speed of the unit from 1.5 to 1.45.
• Steppe Lancer [Standard & Elite]: Doubled the size of the collision box to prevent multiple units from stacking too tightly.

I’d recommend giving them a play and letting us know what you think in a new discussion thread, since it will help us get a feel for where they stand as of the latest build

Thanks for all the feedback; keep it coming! =)