Mounted Bow Army - how to use?

[Carthago]

I often played with Parthia and Armenia in R2TW and always focussed on armies with 15-17 Bow cavalry and some cataphracts to deal with skirmishers. My approach was quite simple, all bow cavs in a line, deactivate skirmish mode, auto shot on, and attack the enemy line by nearing it until it's in range of the horse archers and then turn around using parthian shot. With that simple maneuver I easily won against any equal sized army without too many archers in it.

I tried to do that with the Huns aswell (first in custom battle mode) and I recognised that these damn horse archers don't use parthian shot, even if they have that ability! They only seem to fire when I commanded them to aim at a certain enemy explicitely but then they stopped running away and came in range of the enemy close combattants.

So I haven't the faintest idea how to use sole mounted armies without infantry (Don't wanna use infantry as huns...). Does anyone has an idea how to use mounted archers efficiently?

[Jackal2233]

Mounted archers with parthian shot work fine for me, double check your fire-at-will toggle. You could have mistaken the skirmish toggle with the fire-at-will toggle. It's the only explanation for the behavior you described, it also took me a while to get used to the new UI as I've made this mistake a few times.

Huns seem to be the only ones with parthian shot though, I wonder if this was historical, or for game balancing.

My approach is different, I just shoot them to death and continue repositioning my melee cavalry until out of ammo, then just sandwich the exhausted leftovers, with melee charging first.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Huns seem to be the only ones with parthian shot though, I wonder if this was historical, or for game balancing.

Any horse archer with half of brain knew how to do this.

[Keyser]

Well the huns do use parthian shots... It's weird.

Any way the best way to use them is to surround the ennemy with your horse archers to get shots in the rear of units.
Currently in Attila fire arrows are weirdly superior to normal arrows, however if you are facing armoured ennemies, heavy shot is the best choice in my experience.

Use your melee and shock cav to try to isolate and destroy the ennemy generals and melee cav early in the fight. Micro your horse archers to shot in the rear of units or draw and isolate groups of ennemy units out of the line and destroy them piecemeal.

Never hesitate to charge with the horse archers, the huns have decent melee stats and the "scare" ability, if you charge with 4 units of horse archers from all direction, even spearmen will get destroyed quickly if they aren't in formation.