How to Fight Parthia?

[ixtab312]

I am playing as Maurya and I won some tough wars mainly against Baktria but I am finding it hard to defeat Parthian army in battlefield, they are mainly composed of 4-6 super heavy shock cavalry, 2-4 heavy melee cavalry and rest horse archers medieum and heavy and my army is getting slaughtered. Even my elephant units are getting destroyed in 1v1 against their super heavy shock cavalry.

I have tried a foot archer heavy army but it got charged too often, I can't really field horse archers as my options are limited, and my cavalry heavy army (including elephants but not many horse archers) gets decimated.

So any ideas, what should I be doing here?

[~Seleukos.I.Nikator~]

What battle difficulty are you playing at? I find it strange that your elephants loose 1v1 against their cavalry.

[ixtab312]

Normal difficulty, basically on my left flank they had 3 super heavy shock cavalry and one medium horse Archer, I engaged them with my 3 elephant units, one of them general with 80% strength, rest two were at 100% strength. These units were fighting their own little Battle completely disconnected from rest of the Battle. The medieum horse Archer unit left after some time and all of my 3 elephant units got destroyed with them loosing 10-20% of their strength.

[~Seleukos.I.Nikator~]

Did your elephants take a lot of missile damage prior to their duel with the Parthian cataphracts? Normally, the elephants should quite easily deal with cavalry, even if it's heavy cataphracts, I believe.

[Dago Red]

I guess there's a reason Crassus got a pot of gold poured down his mouth and Caesar was assassinated the moment he announced another campaign into that hell hole.

One of the best counters to horse archers is actually slingers. They are super effective, and cheap, and you can afford to lose high numbers of them because they are both cheap and only 3rd class. You can also use some to direct fire at even heavy cav and help to whittle them down before engaging with your own, though this is very dependent on terrain and position. Don't know if Maurya has access to any, but 4 slingers protected by some spearmen with cav and elephants on the flanks would do wonders along with an oxybeles. If it's really bad, take the high ground or retreat.

[ablebodie]

Seriously just recruit a few levy armies of Mauryan Spearmen/Elite Spearmen with Mauryan Slingers backing them up. Maybe 11 Spearmen units (2-3 of them Elites), 8 Slingers, your General as a Cavalry unit or Elephant. Thin your center, reinforce your flanks, with your slingers in second line. Place your general in the middle behind all of them and outshoot the horse archers while your spears overwhelm the heavy flank attacks. If you want to take cities with these armies, replace 4 slingers with archers as you like.

As stated, you can afford tremendous losses in these kinds of stacks, while Parthians can't. And if you run two stacks together, there's no world where you don't melt their horse archers as soon as they come into range.

[Ptolemaios Soter]

You could slinger-spam and wipe them out pretty easily, but I prefer to build realistic armies that are adaptable in any situation. In my opinion, AI Parthia focuses too heavily on cavalry, while the AI also sucks at managing missile units in general. I haven't played as the Mauryans, but you have two really important things going for you. First is that all of your native missile units are 200 strength, which gives you a massive advantage in exchanging volleys. Not only that, but you have (at 200 men per unit) elite longbow archers who can outrange any unit in the game.

The biggest thing you can do to defeat Parthia though is just to have a heavy mainline with large shields. Don't bother fielding the light spearmen, but if you can get 6 elite spears, they'll be able to soak up all of the missile fire you need while your archers shred their horse archers. Just make sure that any of your axmen or macemen are far back and well protected - or better yet just use the heavy swordsmen in any stack that is likely to face Parthia. Likewise you want to keep your elephants out of missile range as I assume that's why you were losing those battles. Lastly, you can recruit 1 or 2 indo-hellenic peltasts (not the ones in your native roster, but the mercenaries with 60 armor) and just sit them in front of your line to soak up fire. They'll die, but the enemy will run out of ammo before they can do more damage to your core troops.

The downside of this type of army is that you have to be prepared to take losses in your mainline troops every time you fight Parthia. If that's not OK, I'm afraid slinger spam is your best bet.

As a side note, the best way to win as Parthia is to use a smaller number of horse archers, the lighter base version instead of the heavy ones, and to add more elite foot archers with a small but solid melee component as well. This is an adaptable force that can beat any enemy in any situation (even sieges). I've won against full stacks of elites of almost every faction with this composition and rarely if ever have more than a couple of dozen losses:
6 parthian HAs
1 heavy HA (early general or late cataphract archer)
1 medium skirmisher cav
2 cataphracts
2 phalanx (as heavy as possible)
2 men at arms
6 elite persian archers (or other if early game)

Here are the tactics: you need to lure the enemy into a killing zone with a few units at a time where your archers are able to fire at the sides rather than the front of the enemy. 2 phalanx/spears go in the middle, 1 each of your men at arms go about 5 clicks to the sides and 5 clicks forward, then 3 clicks rotates inwards so that everyone is facing a spot forward and toward the middle. Archers get broken into 3 sets of two behind each melee block. Heavy and medium cavalry on the flanks. 2 groups of 3 HAs operating totally independently. So you have 3 separate armies. The goal is to use your HAs to break up the enemy formation and harass them enough that they need to charge toward your main army of foot soldiers. Always have autofire off on your HAs unless chasing. Usually the battle begins by luring out the enemy cavalry and decimating them. Then you slowly draw out their skirmishers. The AI will usually accompany them with some melee units. That's OK and don't expect to get kills. Just harass them, draw them out, and ideally tire them out. Move your main army as needed to force the confrontation when ready. The AI will turn and start sending their units toward your center, but because they're spread out each will die before they make contact. Use your archers manually if needed to target the opposite side so that you're always hitting the back/flank with arrows. Use your cataphracts to further isolate any units that threaten a flanking maneuver and double charge with your medium cavalry if needed. HAs sit back and clean up routers. Lastly, if you're impossible outmatched, just do the same thing but with your force against the edge of the map, and retreat your whole army when they get too close. When the next battle starts, you'll have refilled ammo and have incurred no casualties from the first round. (Sorry for the tangentially off-topic post, but I love Parthia and couldn't help myself).

[ltsweeting]

Not sure how Maurya goes with Siege warfare but if I wasn't building missile, spear and cav counter armies I'd just avoid fighting them in the open field and target their cities. Usually cav factions like Parthia don't do well in sieges.

[Fondor_Yards]

Play as Media and laugh as all your spearmen are archers and your archers are spearmen. On a more helpful note I also find Parthia fields some of most annoying armies since they can (and usually do) spam huge amounts of both cataphracts and men at arms in each army. Your cavalry is pretty weak for the eastern side of the map so you won't match them head on there, so instead play to your strengths. The strength of the indian army are missile troops, assault infantry, and elephants. The use of missile troops has already been covered. You have one of the, if not the very best assault infantry in game between your heavy macemen, axemen, and guildsmen, rivaled really only by the thracian factions. I'd recommending at least 2 of some combo of those, their use and the elephants will be the same here. While your crazy longbow/slingers chew up the HA, in my experience the AI likes to send their melee cav at your flanks, preferable attacking non spearmen (of course I've seen them charge head on into pikes plenty of times so AI is gonna AI), so stash your assault infantry/elephants on your flanks, but preferable behind other screening forces. Once they charge your screeners on the flanks, move your behind and counter charge them. At which point they will either try to retreat, which should give them some quick casualties or they will stay and slug it out in which case your elephants and infantry will chew them to pieces. Other then kinsmen and medians, all parthian cavalry(and cataphracts/lancers in general for all factions) will usually have very low melee defense and no shields, meaning all their defense is coming from their armour. I forget if the Armour Piercing stat still reduces armour by half, but even if it doesn't those units get big bonuses to it making them perfect for eating them up. For your front line infantry to take the arrow rain/cat charge, hoplites are your best bet (well pikes are but those are very hard to get as your faction) assuming you've hit your reforms.

Don't forget your other options. Defensive traps can be very useful for taking bites out of enemy units. Forts will force the enemy into a tight group to attack when trying to get in, making them easy targets for your missile troops and pretty much takes away their charge.

In more not helpful if you're the mauryans information, scythed chariots ing destroy cavalry like nobody's business.

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

Moved to the appropriate thread. Feel free to continue.

[armen]

Armor piercing damage for both slingers and archers are the same?

[ixtab312]

Everything is useless at this point, anything that is above light tier in parthian army is just unstoppable. My line of six slingers got decimated by their 5 medieum horse archers, while taking bare minimum casuality. Their heavy shock cavalry is charging straight into elite mauryan spearman and decimating it. Even my elephants are useless to their melee cavalry.
And yet I will win the war because AI is still stupid as hell. Parthian has positioned all her 3 full stacked army against me while one of my Arabian Ally landed one full stack army and in a 15-20 turn has taken six of Parthian provinces making them one province minor as Parthian won't send anything to fight them, everything is arrayed against human player.

[Ptolemaios Soter]

Mauryan slingers don't have shields - unlike greek and eastern slingers. That makes them vastly more vulnerable to missile fire, particularly arrows since they also have no armor. If you use your elite spearmen to catch the enemy fire while holding your slingers back (they outrange Parthian horse archers significantly), you'll decimate them. However I also can't seem to replicate your results. I just tried a custom battle with 6 slingers and a cavalry general against a cataphract general and 5 medium horse archers. Because I had literally no melee troops, one of their horse archers charged my slingers, and yet despite that I routed their army with only 356 losses - not a single unit lost.

Likewise the cataphract charge and elephants. Custom battle and my elephants slaughtered their cataphracts while my unit of elite spearmen routed a second cataphract that had been charging frontally. The first charge cost me 3 units on impact and another 5 during the melee before it withdrew to cycle charge. Eventually it lost and only cost me 27 spearmen total. My guess on both cases is that your units had taken a lot of missile damage before the melee.

That's almost beside the point though, because if you can use 3,630 gold worth of levy units to even match an enemy army costing nearly double that (6,625), you're doing well. Levies shouldn't be able to defeat elites, even if you have the "counter-unit" to their army build. Similarly the elite spearmen cost less than half as much as a cataphract.

My advice would be to use longbow archers instead of slingers, but regardless, to hold them back behind your mainline and let your heavy spears absorb the enemy (charges and/or arrows). If you want to win with few losses, build elite, expensive stacks to match what you're facing. But if you can't afford that, just be OK with trading 2-1 against the enemy.

I'm trying to be helpful, not confrontational, but I also think combat is pretty well balanced right now* and it's important to be able to replicate your battle results. Happy to fight a custom battle with you with the specific builds if you'd like to test out strategies.

*Actually, I would love to see a debuff to missile damage against armor, but that was already settled with KAM's last experimental battle pack before the last update, and I am apparently in the minority

Armor piercing damage for both slingers and archers are the same?

No. It depends on what unit you're looking at, but I believe AP damage for slingers is always higher. The best AP archers are Cretans who have a special bow entry with lower range but higher AP (8). Even levy Greek slingers have 10 AP while Rhodians and Belearics have 12. Archers deal more overall damage and so are generally more useful against lightly armored units while also often having more armor themselves. Slingers deal more AP damage, have more ammo, and often have shields.

[ixtab312]

Thanks man, I will try again, I think I was just frustrated when I made that post, hence was too harsh.

[Jake Armitage]

or just passionate