5-range kipchaks sound just awful, borderline unusable and totally kneecaps one of the cumans’ major strengths for no reason at all.
steppe husbandry is a decent tech for the hussar spam alone and mostly applies to the other two units for flavor, which is fine.
i agree that cuman mercenaries needs some sort of rework or to just be totally scrapped – i’m in favor of making kipchaks trainable at archery ranges but anything other than the current tech would work.
i guess the question is, why is it important that cumans have fully upgraded heavy cav archers?
their lategame is already very strong, in a vacuum – fully upgraded halberdiers, champions with everything except supplies, guilds, siege onager and siege ram, paladin and hussar that move 15% faster.
this isn’t a set of changes that would address any of their current weaknesses, it actively undermines their existing strengths, it wouldn’t make them more fair or fun to play as or against, and it works against their thematic civ identity (as the steppe civ that transitions *away* from cav archers as it becomes more europeanized).