After having reading your post, i feel like being a lancer is very difficult, you risk your life against every class but peasants, you can be one shot by mw arbalest + mw bolts if you don't wear heavy armor, your horse can die after having being shot only 4-5 times into body by bows +3 and arrows +3, and 2-3 times by arbalest (full loomed aswell), and so on ...
That's how you sum up a "lancer life", only "downsides" (that you exaggerate a lot imo).
Your resume is just biaised since you didn't speak about advantages lancers have towards infantry.
- You can 1 shot almost everything with couching. And no couching is not as risky as you describe it, why? As a 1 hander, my only option against lancers is to sidewalk on the right and do a left swing. How to counter that as a couchwhore lancer? Go a bit on your left before the impact. Many cav do that everytime, so it's impossible to kill them for a 1h. And please don't say me that i just have to sidewalk on the other side, even if i do it while the lancer is going on the left, his lance would hit my right arm.
- You 1 or 2 shot everything at high speed (i've 6 if, +3 katafraktoi armor, 57 head armor, and i often get one shot by lancers).
- Even after having losing your horse, you can fight in melee with decent weapons and no lack of wpf (unlike archers and crossbowmen who can only fight with shit weap but mace and have rarely more than 80 wpf in 2h)
- Again about fighting a shielder, you can bump/lance them easily, something you forgot to mention.
- You compared inf (who backstab and gang alot in your opinion) with cav who are actually doing the same. Fallacious argument again, how dare you putting cav and infantry on the same line when you know that cav can come from every sides and that you can hardly see them coming when you're fighting due to their speed.
- You are complaining because your horse can "only" handle 4 or 5 shot into body by full loomed archer's gears? Why didn't you give us stats with non loomed archer/crossbowmen gears instead? It would be much more relevant since the majority of ranged do not have full loomed weapons ;) bad faith again, at least try to be more objective next time you write such a long text.
- You take a lot of risks each time you try to kill someone who's not a peasant? Isn't that the case for every class? If you wanted to do a comparison between inf and cav, it would have been more relevant to do it here. Is it more difficult to kill a 1h (for exemple) as a lancer or as a poleaxe-user? Here is a good comparison ;)
There is certainly more to say, but i think it's already enough.
Oh, and i don't think moving this topic into the Beginners Help and Guides is a good idea. He's explaining how to get kills as a lancer, not how to be usefull as a lancer, if newbies followed such advices, they would just attack peasants and avoid everything else. In other words, they would be merely useless.