Successful build - Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent.

Link to build: https://jenkins.wildfiregames.com/job/differential/183/display/redirect

The overly slow spear cavalry attack speed is something I dislike. The increased attack speed feels very good and makes spear cavalry more enjoyable to use. I also did some quick unit tests. 3 rounds of 10 spear cav vs 10 jav cav and then 20 vs 20 with the changes and without. In vanilla 10 vs 10
I had spear cavalry winning by 3 alive, 1 alive and then losing to 1. In 20 vs 20, the survivors were 4 spear cav, 3 spear cav and 4 javelin cav. With the changes in the 10vs10, I had spear cavalry surviving with 4, 1 and 3. In the 20vs20 I had spear cav survive with 4, 4 and 6 units.
Obviously a big part of the results is rng due to unit promotions, but overall, in my opinion, this is a good change. Though, it would also be best to get the opinions of other people such as @Feldfeld.

Is fine.

I also like the spear cav atk speed increase, currently javelin cavalry can outmicro spear cav without a significant advantage in numbers (which many expect to favor the spear cavalry).

For a high number of cavalry I would expect the skirmish cavalry to win due to the lack of surface area for the spear cavalry, which seems to not be the case in valihrant's test with 20x20.

This can be a concern since many civilizations don't have spear cavalry available, and also having javelin cavalry being able to beat in high numbers forces the player to make a balanced cavalry composition instead of going full on spear cavalry on cav vs cav matchups.

Currently spear cavalry are quite decent at harassing fields due to their increased pierce armor and health, so I would expect them to perform even better now with the increased attack rate, since damage is better distributed and less walk time for women.

To alleviate them being overpowered at the two aforementioned scenarios I would suggest some kind of nerf, health or armor wise. Especially considering that they should be able to promote much easier now and level 3 spear cavalry are absolute units.

That said, I didn't perform the tests myself, so I would defer to valihrant's judgement at the moment.

Attack damage is lowered as nerf.

Attack damage is lowered as nerf.

Actually damage per second isn't lowered: (6 + 5) / 2 = 5.5 and (4 + 3) / 1.25 = 5.6

I'm no historian, but I wonder if we could tweak the animation to make it look more realistic rather than tweaking the attack rate (I assume the realistic repeat rate of a spear is far slower than that of a sword?).

I do not think it is so slower. You can do stabbing with spear as fast as with short sword when staying at one spot.
And swordsman does have 750 repeat time so this is still slower.

In D1365#119665, @Nescio wrote:

Actually damage per second isn't lowered: (6 + 5) / 2 = 5.5 and (4 + 3) / 1.25 = 5.6

But is compared to the situation when only attack speed would change.

But is compared to the situation when only attack speed would change.

Actually I would also support a damage increase, since currently spearmen are clearly weaker than swordsmen. Current total damage per second values for comparison:

                      b  ,   c  ,   h
cavalry axeman     : 9.2 , 18.4 , 36.8
cavalry spearman   : 5.5 , 11   , 22
cavalry swordsman  : 8.7 , 17.3 , 34.7
infantry axeman    : 8   , 16   , 32
infantry spearman  : 5.5 , 12.2 , 24.4
infantry swordsman : 7.3 , 14.7 , 29.3

I think 1.5 repeat time are better, but im ok with this values.