At our club we had a go at fighting a battle between Parthians and 'Marian Roman' so it was designed to be Carrhae 'like'
Did use an 'infinite wargames table' so the Romans couldn't pin the Parthians against the edge of the world
Wrote it up in my blog
https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/2026/07/30/refighting-almost-the-battle-of-carrhae-53-bc/
A few years ago we played a couple of games like Carrhae using my house rules. As these use elements like DBx rather than fewer deeper units we were able to set up the legions in a large open square one element deep all around. (They are at little risk of being defeated in a frontal melee by horse archers and have good protection from their arrows.)
In the centre of the square we started the Roman lights and cavalry which, since I allow both types to interpenetrate legions, had no difficulty leaving it once they descried the Parthian approach. The Romans significantly outnumbered the Parthians overall but in the first game we restricted the numbers of Roman cavalry presuming their allies had deserted them. That Roman cavalry proved insufficient to stand up to the much greater Parthian mounted force and once they were defeated the Parthians flowed around the square.
Unable to move in different directions without breaking the square, the Roman infantry continued to advance forwards and though their lights were able to keep some of the Parthians in check they were too few in number to be everywhere at once. Slowly but surely Roman casualties mounted without them being able to effectively respond in kind. In my rules an army can be defeated either by destroying enough of its units to break it or by wearing its stamina down to the point where its army morale cracks. Thus it was that the Romans were ultimately defeated by a never ending trickle of demoralising casualties from the horse archers.
For our second game we added in the previously absent allied cavalry and this changed things around completely. The Romans now had sufficient cavalry, though still outnumbered, in conjunction with their light infantry to significantly cramp the style of the horse archers and catch a goodly number of them. This time Rome had an emphatic win.
The concept of not having a table edge for the figures to fall off of was an interesting idea and probably played to the Parthian advantage. I certainly remember in my days of being a Roman general getting demoralised in having my lads chase light cavalry across a featureless battlefield.
Quote from: dwkay57 on Today at 06:58 AMThe concept of not having a table edge for the figures to fall off of was an interesting idea and probably played to the Parthian advantage. I certainly remember in my days of being a Roman general getting demoralised in having my lads chase light cavalry across a featureless battlefield.
Well we felt it made the Roman player actually think about how to trap people, mainly against other Romans if they came too close 8)