Chaplain118's guide on the Parthians
The Parthian Shot
Their horses pound the deserts of Asia while their riders rain death from their bows. Many have walked into the desert to crush them, and many have been swallowed by the desert, and only broken arrow shafts remain as a mark of the aggressor's graves.
The Parthians, formerly known as the Purple Pajamas faction, is brought to their glory in RS. Situated on the far east of the map, Parthia is in a ripe position to dominate all of Asia and Africa. In this guide, you will learn how to lead this phenomenal faction to victory and perhaps even to the gates of Rome...
*sorry for the lack of actual screenshots, I'm lacking access to my RTW game in college, but come Christmas I should be able to add in pictures which I hope will make everything clearer.
Beginning phase
You'll notice right off the bat that your economy is in piss poor shape and that only the provinces that have contact with water will be in the black. You'll want to heavily tax all of your cities, or at most keep the happiness in the yellow. Once you do that, go find your armies and put all of your horse archers together, this will be your most important army. Proceed to build as much TRADE buildings as possible, especially roads, that will not only increase your income, but will also be able to help your armies move.
Early Army
Your early army should consists of the conglomeration of your starting units around the capital (make sure you get your horse archers in this army as they're useless in cities). Once you take this army, march south and start a war with the Seleucids.
Initially, most of your enemies will be phalangite based, which is nice because you have the advantage in speed. So with that in mind let's talk basic tactics.
Your first targets are usually small Seleucid field armies. When you attack these armies, divide your army into two basic groups: stationary and nonstationary.
Your stationary troops should consist of your Eastern Infantry, your HEAVY general, and your cataphracts. The remainder of your army (i.e. horse archers and possibly LIGHT general) will be the nonstationary army. You should divide your nonstationary army into 3 groups and advance them toward the enemy.
Your right and left wings should advance further than your center, allowing you to form a crescent shape, which will most likely draw your enemies toward you. At this point, your horse archers should start to fire. As the enemy start to chase your center, bring your left or right wing behind them and shoot. If the enemy decides instead to go for all three groups, that's fine, you can usually divide the groups into smaller groups, keep in mind that you want to form a basic crescent shape so while the enemy is occupied with one group/unit, another group/unit can flank the enemy and pepper them with arrows.
At this point of the game, you really only need one field army to start destroying the enemy, which is nice, since you can build up a lot of experience this way at very little cost of your own units. In fact, I've gotten golden chevrons for my Eastern Mounted Archers before I even made my way to the Holy Land.
Now, this army is great and all, but you have a really reallyeconomy. so what do you do? You start taking Seleucid towns. Always enslave populations, unless you're capturing large settlements, because this will give you an economic boost as slaves are a valuable trade source. Send your diplomats to as many factions as you can to secure trade agreements, particularly with the Sarmatians as they control the other side of the Caspian sea, which is a HUGE money spinner.
Siege Warfare
I can already hear you say: "Chaplain, horse archers are absolutely terrible in street combats in a city, how the hell can we take towns with these things?"
You don't.
Well, you do, but you use a more unorthodox way. You see, horse archers and all other missile units can shoot OVER the wooden walls of the early game. So what you do is, you divide the army into stationary and nonstationary like you would in a field fight, but you march the nonstationary troops up to the gates, where they can actually kill off a great deal of the initial defenders. Excellent, now move your ram toward the city gates.
Before pounding down the gates, create a few openings in the walls surrounding the gates, that way you can have multiple intrusion and extrusion points.
Once you get in, have your infantry charge forward as a buffer for your horse archers. ALWAYS KEEP YOUR HORSE ARCHERS IN A SQUARE RATHER THAN A STREET. This will ensure that you have certain degrees of mobility. And remember the multiple holes in the wall? If things start going sour, you can pull out much faster through 3 openings than through one opening.
As you'll notice, your Eastern Infantry are very prone to death against phlangites, you have two choices:
1. Grit your teeth and hope they won't break (bad idea, you might crack your teeth. Although if you're playing on easy, your Eastern Infantry can take on silver shield pikemen, but who plays on easy?)
2. Before sending your foot soldiers on a suicidal attack, swing some horse archers through another street to strike the enemy flank (better, but very time consuming. But better nevertheless.)
Once you clear the streets, and your Eastern Infantry is down to about 20 men, you send your heavy (i.e. not horse archer or skirmisher) cavalry into the city. Their job is to reinforce your horse archers and act as a buffer if necessary (and I can already picture the tears running down your face at the thought of your precious few cataphracts being slaughtered by 5 phalangites). But most likely you won't be needing a buffer as your horse archers are usually pretty efficient at killing stuff. On to the town square...
Finally, open space! Use your last bit of infantry (or some of your heavy cavalry) to tie up the opposing army. Now swing your horse archers around them and let loose the arrows.
Although
You should always target the enemy general, as he is fast enough to catch your horse archers and kill them like flies. Once you shoot him and his guards dead, go back to dropping the enemy army.
The remaining slaughter should take about a few minutes, but at the end of the day, you will have captured the city and sold the population to slavery. Now retrain your infantry and hire a cheap unit to guard the settlement, it's time to get moving again.
The more settlements you take, the more money you will get, which is very important for the development of your army.
Another method for sieging, mentioned by Roborob, is to simply wait outside of the settlement with your horse archers until the enemy settlement sallies out, turning the fight into an open field fight. Personally I don't like this method in that you can't really assault settlements in the early game to help out your dismal economy, although it does work very very well once you have a powerful economy.
Economy
Yes, you have POTENTIAL to be a powerful economy, but when you first start, your economy, for the lack of a better word, SUCKS, which is why you're entirely reliant upon ONE and ONLY ONE army to dissect the Seleucid empire from the East.
Remember to keep the cities near water well maintained. The one furthest north (I can't remember the name at the moment, but I think it might be Maracanda), don't bother with building roads, it's isolated enough to deter any potential invaders. Instead, focus building PORTS for that one city. I've hit 6000+ earnings there, and once it grew to a decent size, 12k+
You want to make a beeline for the Red Sea coastline, the Arabian peninsula, and Mesopotamia. The cities that have access to the Red Sea will be tough to manage because you'll be deciding between roads and ports, but once you develop them, they can rival the Aegean Sea in terms of commerce income. What I do with those settlements is normally alternate building, so I can get a fairly balanced mix of both. Once you clear out the pirates (to avoid blockades), you would have a very nice source of income from that area. I've had all the cities around the Red Sea earn up to something of 10k each per turn, but that was in the late game when I had pretty much secured the deserts.
A key thing to remember, the grain import/export system is kind of weird. If you export, your income actually goes down than if you didn't even bother with that upgrade path, I don't know if it's a bug or not, but experience tells me that if you can pick between imports and exports, don't, just leave that upgrade blank.
Gardens are important, they will increase money making by a lot.
I've noticed the areas around Mesopotamia are actually really hard to develop, either moving your capital there to Babylon or have them become military production centers are your best bets. Once you establish a strong trade networks, that area starts to be a money spinner.
Trade networks are great if you have large swathes of land, build these when you can link up the various Seleucid towns you've captured and can defend any intruders from coming in. This is usually done after crushing the Seleucids at their capital for the 18th timeBut the general rule of thumb is, develop your trade networks later, roads are more important.
Temples, temples, temples. The Cultural Penalty is slightly offset by the fact that the bigger Seleucid towns have very advanced temples, which means you'll actually get higher rates of happiness than if you tear that down and impose your religion on them. So if you see a "Great Temple of Artemis" or something like that, leave it be. If you see a shrine, tear that down, nobody liked it anyways.
Midway Army
No you will not be using Aircraft carriers (har har pun), what you WILL use is your newfound economy, which should be rising as you're picking the Seleucid Empire apart. Before you consider upgrading your armies, make sure you take the areas surrounding the Red Sea. That area will be a chief trade hub once you clear out the pirates and control all the cities there.
One of the great things you'll notice as you approach the Seleucid capital is the diversity of the mercenaries you can hire. You should always hire SOME Desert Infantry as they'll be required to use siege engines. But mercenary hoplites are more effective and you should always hire those when possible. But the best mercenaries you can get are:
Ok, maybe not THOSE elephants, but it was the only picture I had on hand that had elephants in them... so cut me some slack
These things are incredible, the walking tanks of the ancient world. You will incorporate these with one of your nonstationary groups, either the left or the right wing.
CAVEAT:
Elephants are NOT invincible, do NOT charge them headfirst into spears, use the same tactics with them as you do with horse archers, which will require micromanagement (pause button works great here). If you can get them behind enemy lines, you can wreck some serious havoc though.
They are, however, very nice counterweights against an enemy general
So your midway army should consist of your former veteran horse archers, some mercenaries, and stacks of new horse archers. Always recruit Eastern Mounted Archers, they cost less than Persian Cavalry and will deal out the same amount of damage.
At this point, the Seleucid field armies will start to be a joke and you'll start to wonder how you can take down WALLED cities. Siege towers work wonders if you have lots of infantry, but in most cases what you want are SAP POINTS. These nifty little buggers are often times ignored in most siege warfare as people don't really like them. I don't know why, they're like catapults, only cheaper in my opinion. Send some sapping capable units into them, and next thing you know, the enemy walls come crashing down. And then repeat the same maneuvers you usually do with a small settlement.
Sometimes, you'll run across armies that have catapults. Make SURE you get those things out of action as fast as you can. You can either:
A. Use your horse archers to shoot them out of action (good idea if the RTW engine actually listens to your orders, half the time my horse archers think that the phalangites are better targets and starts shooting THEM rather than the catapults)
or
B. You can use your cataphracts or Eastern heavy cavalry to take down the catapults. In fact, you should invest in more Eastern heavy cavalry than cataphracts in that they can engage in limited hand to hand combat but still will run away from the phalangites that will be guarding the catapult engineers.
But once you get rid of the catapults, the rest of the battle will be a cakewalk. And if you use elephants well (sending them charging against the SIDE of enemy infantry not only kills more, but also causes the same psychological damage as a charge to the rear), the battle should be really tipped to your favor.
Late Army
You now hold the lands of the former Seleucid Empire. The Red Sea, Arabian peninsula, and Caspian sea trades are filling your coffers with abundant gold. The Ptolemies are starting to be a thorn in your side, and up north, Armenia, Pontus, and Sarmatia are rubbing their fists, hungry for your land. Welcome to the middle stage of gameplay but the late stage of your army.
You should now have four kinds of armies: Desert Assault Armies, Woodland Assault Armies, Siege Armies, and Veteran Armies.
Your Desert Assault Armies should consist of freshly trained Horse archers (You can throw in Persian cavalry if you want, but my opinion is that Eastern Mounted Archers are a better bargain) designed to crush any opposition you will meet on the open plains.
Your Woodland Assault Armies should consist of Horse archers, cataphracts, elephants, and a healthy mix of light and heavy infantry. This will allow your army to fight in woods without losing your missile power.
Your Siege Armies should consist of heavy infantry, horse archers, elephants, and catapults if you can build them (its been a while, i forget if you can build them)
Your veteran armies should be the armies from the good old days, when the Seleucids were still that big grey blob on the map. These are the guys you want to use to kill top enemy generals, these are the guys you build monuments after. These are the guys you use to show that you don't take
Notice I don't have a siege relief army type. That's because at this point, you should have a mobile enough force to move one of your Assault Armies around your empire to knock out enemy sieging armies in a field fight. So a sallying forth army type is practically useless.
At this point, your focus should be the other horse archer capable factions. And at this point, you might suffer from the usual RTW horse archer hating syndrome. Don't worry, you have your economy as well as your separate armies on your side.
Keep in mind that the key thing about horse archer power is MASS. So the greater number of horse archers you have, the more effective they are at killing the enemy. So with that in mind:
In open fields, loose formation is your best bet, as that spaces out your units so they won't get massacred, but on the flip side, your fire isn't as concentrated either. That's where the mass comes in again. Put a group of 3 or 4 horse archers together and have them go after a single group of enemy horse archers. You might take some losses, but you will usually win by sheer volume of arrow output.
In forests, you want to bottleneck the enemy horse archers while keeping their infantry tied up. You can usually do this by having your horse archers hide in the trees while your elephants stand out in an open piece of ground. Your infantry will be ALWAYS in front of your horse archers to either ambush or to act as buffer.
In sieges, send your elephants forward to tie up the horse archers, then cut them down with your heavy infantry. Once you reach the square, use the same tactics as you would in an open field.
The key point in any of these situation (minus the siege situation) is ALWAYS SEEK HIGHER GROUND. That will give your horse archers a longer distance and it will tire out the opposing HA.
But I've noticed the AI tends to spam a lot of Hillmen for the eastern factions at first, which gives you a nice leverage as those drop faster than the phalangites you're used to seeing and you can usually knock Armenia and Pontus out pretty fast and thus focus on the Sarmatians. Although a couple of forts in the mountain passes often times will do the trick of stopping their advance toward your lands.
----------
After you've wiped out enemies capable of fielding horse archers, you're practically in the clear. All of Africa and Asia should tremble at the sound of your horses pounding the earth, and if you're particularly ambitious, you can pack a few armies in some boats and send them to Rome, because after all, what is Parthia's power without this:
---
A note on ambushing the enemy:
If you can set up an ambush and the enemy doesn't have time to prepare, set up your army around the enemy's deployment area, put your general (who should be a LIGHT general, i.e. skirmisher general, rather than a HEAVY general, i.e. cataphract general) in front of the enemy army. The second the battle starts, your horse archers will most likely destroy 10 to 30% of the enemy army as well as throwing it into disarray as they try to figure out which one of your units to attack.
This guide can be used for almost any faction that uses horse archers, although it was written with the Parthians in mind, which reminds me:
DON'T EVER SEND OUT A SCOUTING PARTY OF ONLY A FEW HORSE ARCHERS AND EXPECT THEM TO LIVE. They'll run out of ammo, and before you know it, you're either forced to run (and most likely lose those units) or forced to tackle the enemy head on (and definitely lose those units).
Romulus753 brought up a good point about being sandwiched, so I'll add that in here (even though it's only a few posts down)
If you are stuck between two armies, then you have to assess your current predicament. In most cases, there are two things that can happen:
1. You're stuck between two slow moving phalangite or other infantry based armies.
2. You're stuck between two fast moving armies.
In the first case, you concentrate fire on the nearest army, use the same tactics as you would in any normal field battle. Always keep a portion of your army as reserves to tackle the enemy reinforcements, failure to do so will result in your horse archers running out of ammo, and that's the logistical nightmare of any Parthian commander. This would be the only time when Persian cavalry comes in handy as they have the "extra_ammo" attribute. Once you've taken care of the first army, wheel your forces around and do the same maneuvers for the second enemy army. If you can, tell the horse archers that are out of ammo to retreat. If you can't, send them to the farthest corner of the map to avoid being killed.
In the second case, you want to aim for the opponent's horse archers first and ignore all enemy units that can't fire on you. Then you want to split your armies into two groups, one going left and one going right (assuming the enemy is coming from in front and behind you). This will keep the two enemy army split and you can then concentrate on their units that can't fire on you.
In almost all cases, you WILL be presented with the first scenario more, particularly as you're fighting the Seleucids and other Diadochi factions. To avoid so many of the second situation, take a pre-emptive strike against the other Eastern factions while they're still in their massed infantry mindset.
Now take up the bow, saddle up the horses, and let your empire spread like the blood of your enemies.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by romulus753
(Okay, just once)
