parthians

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aphillathehun
Posts: 379
Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2013 2:05 am

parthians

Post by aphillathehun »

I realize too late I should have started a separate thread for these rather than fouling up your announcement thread and hiding this from anyone else who might be interested.

I think there are possibilities for interesting games with the Parthians. I generally agree that if you're doing the part of a campaign where the Romans are marching and the Parthians are just swarming them with horse archers and running away, the gaming possibilities are pretty limited, and perhaps not all that interesting.

But in the campaigns between the Romans and the Parthians I imagine many of them came down to a couple of kinds of situations that should be easy to game on the tabletop.
1) Romans are at your important Parthian city, you can either give battle or fall into a siege (and lose)
2) You've worn the Romans down and they are about to escape into one of their fortified cities, you can try to finish them off in the field or give up

Either one of these could make for an interesting tabletop game. In both of them you'll need both horse archers and cataphracts. The horse archers should have some impact but shouldn't be decisive on their own. And the cataphracts versus the rest of the Romans ought to be interesting.

So that's why I was wondering about them, how to rate them, and anything special about using those kinds of units.
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SteveBurt
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Re: parthians

Post by SteveBurt »

In the past I've had some very good Roman v Parthian games, but you do need to set up the scenario properly. I remember doing the 'Horse v Foot' scenario from one of the Charles Grant scenario books. The Romans start in march formation on a road near some hills. The Parthians enter from the plains, and the Romans have to try and make it to the protection of the rough ground.
Another game was based on Marc Antony's (successful) expedition, which gets much less talked about than Crassus' disaster. Romans with an Armenian ally are trying to reach a water hole while being harrassed by Parthians, but the Armenians have their own victory conditions, unknown to the Romans, mainly revolving around saving their own skins.
EvilGinger
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Joined: Wed Sep 04, 2013 3:01 am

Re: parthians

Post by EvilGinger »

Some what typical for Armenian's who played both sides against the middle quite a bit during the Sassanian period. I had not realised that it had started quite so early though.

:evil: Ginger
Dark lord at large....
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