Re: Anyone played the Parthians yet?
Tried these lads 3rd faction out, my first vh/vh game did ok though i think i made a few mistakes you might learn from, being an old shogun/mtw player i immediately wiped out the faction next to me ie. armenia and then fortified that section of the map of from the selucids and egypt. (i still had a that town next to the selucid one but i plumped a big garrison in it and it never got bothered). It was a bit of a gamble but paid off, the forts combined with my big garrison and my constant diplomatic overtures kept either the selucids, pontus or egypt declaring war on me right from the start. It was however a real struggle for cash early and seeing as i didn't want to open the floodgates and declare war on any of my stronger neighbours i ended up taking modern day russia of the scythians, including the Amazon tribe up there. This actually didn't help the cash flow situation as much as invading practically anywhere else would have but it did give me something to do for 20 years.
My neighbours were quite busy during this period though, the selucids were losing a war to the eqyptians and pontus was getting inquisitive.
Conquering russia had increased my income, it had also turned my faction heir into a 9 star general and "trained" about six units of Horse archers to silver chevron status.
I decided it was time to expand the purple area on the map. :) Pontus fell to my sword in less than 5 years, all of modern day turkey bar the remaining greek city (now the greek capital) was under parthian control less than 15 years after my general got back from russia and now the selucids and pontus had been destroyed. My funds were starting to look much better now but i was still behind on the tech tree due to not having enough money for buildings in the begining decades. Still i knew what came next.
So the inevitable, war with Egypt. This was my mistake, it was about 40 years after the start of the game and Egypt had all of the middle east and as a result probably made more money per turn than i had so far. I knew i was going to be outnumbered but i was confident, my 9 star general was still alive and he was now a 10 star with lots of good traits.
He was the core of all my plans, i would use other forces defense but always it was him and the army he lead (now possessing gold chevron HA's) that had won me my battles.
So I sent a force down into egypt, my general(i shall refer to him as the horsemen from now on) and a stack of my best cavalry. It was an armada comprising mostly of HA's and persian cavalry with some cataphracts and a unit of seasoned samartian mercs who had been with me in various guises since russia. The plan this time was to cripple the egyptian economy, i would send "the horseman" down into the heart of egypt cut a swath through whatever armies he came across and then beseige and extermenitae the egyptian capital. This plan had worked previously.
"The horseman" sallied forth from my capital city after stopping in for some new armour, the journey to the egyptian capital was long and i exptected to fight a few battles on the way, but i was confident my horse archer tactics would allow me to reach the capital with more than enough men to do what was needed. It wasn't even half a days journey into the egyptian lands when i came across my first real challenge. A full stack of egyptian units heading towards my lands. He had a composite force, 1200 men in total; archers; pharaoh's bowmen; hordes of phalanxes; desert axeman and the dreaded chariots i had heard so much about. I lost 30 men. "The Horseman" was not impressed by the egyptians. Two turns later and "the Horseman" and his army had fought 5 more battles all against very large composite armies and it was starting to whittle away the troop numbers. Not the HA's just the cataphracts and samartian mercs had taken casualities. Still i was close, one or two more turns to the capital and they seemed to be running out of stacks. I ended the turn and they attacked me with a stack led by the egyptian faction leader, the battle was long and bloody near the end as his leader caught a group of my cataphracts and nearly wiped them out. I ended the battle with only 30 cataphracts left and about 10 sam mersc. Still i won, the faction leader was dead and his heir was a weakling.
I was attacked again immediately this stack wasn't quite full i soon saw why. I deployed my HA's near the front of the deployment so as to start attacking enemy troops as soon as possible and my remaing heavy cav and general as far back as possible. I clicked start battle and my jaw dropped, i was looking at a sea of horses, his army was entirely light cavalry, mine was almost entirely horse archers, i was outnumbered two to one and the only units he had that weren't light cav were chariots. I was deep in enemy territory with no reinforcements and the enemy general had the perfect counters to my two unit types. The battle lasted perhaps five minutes, though perhaps slaughter would be a better word. The pride of parthia, the scourge of russia and the middle east, "The Horseman" was routed and then hacked down from behind by a horde of light cavalry. My samartian mercs, my gold cheveron HA's and my general were all dead, corpes rotting away somewhere on the road to egypt.
I hadn't bothered to build other armies, "The Horseman" had never lost a battle. Egypt rolled over me in a few short years, i probably could have made a comeback, but they sent up armies into my undefended lands immidieatly and truth be told i don't think the heart was in it after that.
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