Best Anti-Parthian army for Epirus?

[Perdiccas]

hi

I'm Epirus. Late game. Have access to all of Hellas/Persian/Indian regional troops.

what is the best army to defend against Parthians?

thanks.

and if you're feeling ambitious--- best Epirote army against Sarmatians and Hayasdan.

[Ownager]

Against horse archers? Not my specialty. My first legion in WRE got destroyed by horse archers. I just form a box and wait. However, heavily armored units are my best guess. Don't chase after them, and use as many Cretan archers as available. I think a good line up would be this. 2-4 Heavily armored phalangites. 6 or so Syrian or Kretan archers. As many horse archers as you can find. Leave space for about 4 units of heavy cavalry, preferable Thessalian heavy cavalry. (More armor than Molosson Agema.)

[BroskiDerpman]

Use as much pikes or troops with good shields and armor. Usually don't bother bringing any foot missiles.

Bum rush them to the red border.

Archers will take forever to eliminate any single unit in EB nor cause huge morale penalties especially when you're running at them, you have no vulnerable units to be charged by cavalry since you got pikes or hopefully tanking units which can absorb tons of damage. You may lose a unit or two depends on the situation but you eliminate more of their units.

Optional is to bring a lot of fast melee cavalry, keep your men together and use melee cavalry to pin and melee infantry to support.

Third choice is to noob box with pikes and have tons of missiles, any kind can take out low armor HAs and the pikes take out cataphracts. If cataphracts run away box them up to the red border.

Very gamey as in real life you can't box anybody up to a magical red border as they'll just run away.

[Principe Alessandro]

My advice is to recruit Persian Heavy Foot Archers, they are the most armored archer unit in the east and they can win archery duels with any Steppe Horse Archer or Foot Archer unit, also add Parthian Spearmen or Levy Phalanxes to protect them, a couple of slingers to deal with the Armored Horse Archers and the Cataphracts and you are good to go, then to run down the fleeing units have two units of fast moving cavalry.

[Perdiccas]

thanks for the advice guys. I really appreciate it.

i might try to experiment with all of your advice... i play slowly.

one other thought i had:
1 gen
4-5 archer spearman
4-5 dahae riders
4-5 heavy persian archers
4-5 indian longbowmen
2 Iranian heavy cav or Prodomoi

[Principe Alessandro]

thanks for the advice guys. I really appreciate it.

i might try to experiment with all of your advice... i play slowly.

one other thought i had:
1 gen
4-5 archer spearman
4-5 dahae riders
4-5 heavy persian archers
4-5 indian longbowmen
2 Iranian heavy cav or Prodomoi

You have a lot of redundant units in this list, firstly the Archer-Spearmen while being a perfect defensive unit with the combo of spear and bow is really weak in archery duels, it has got only 4 points of attack for the bow, range is just 175, and 2 points for armor, the indian longbowmen has better bow attack with 5 points, maybe their secondary AP weapon and 0.26 lethality is good for fighting against other foot infantry but they lack a spear which makes them vulnerable against cavalry charges and the range of their bow is even lower with 170, armor is again just 2 points and this makes them still weak in a archery duel.

Heavy Persian Archers instead have 7 points in armor, their range is 198 and the bow attack is 5 points, they have also more ammo, their secondary melee weapon isn't as strong but enough decent, they are simply the best archer unit for archery duels, their weakness compared to the archer-spearmen is that they need protection against the heavy cavalry but you just need to recruit more spearmen instead of archer-spearmen and longbowmen, or alternatively you could replace the indian-longbowmen with the Heavy persian Archers and keep the archer-spearmen at the flanks of the spear units if you want an overall higher proportion of ranged units without sacrificing too much anti cavalry capabilities.

So basically your infantry should be 50:50 spearmen and heavy persian archers, or 25:25:50 spearmen, archer-spearmen and heavy persian archers, maybe add also some units of slingers and axemen as athanaric has already pointed, about pikemen I'm not really sure, surely you will have less casualties if your line infantry is composed mainly by pike units but they are too slow and not so much flexible.

[athanaric]

Dahae Riders are always a good choice. In general though, I recommend following Principe Alessandro's advice and using many Heavy Persians and Parthian Spearmen. The former out-range most other archers in the game (except for Kretans, which you could theoretically bring along as "icing on the cake", and a few Saka units), plus they have some armour, a sword (still weak in melee, but better than the standard archers), and tons of ammo. The latter are quite well protected from arrows by virtue of their large shields, and are more versatile than they seem. Like mentioned, slingers and Prodromoi can be very powerful in this situation. If you can recruit heavier cavalry in the region, use one or two units of those as well. I would also add a couple of pikemen units and one or two units of local axemen.
Indian Longbowmen are powerful against sedentary enemies, but somewhat lacking against nomadic ones (range and armour are not the best). You can use them as substitutes for the axemen though, given their melee stats.