By default CA do 6 damage, +2 vs spears. +2 again for archer attack upgrades for 10, -2 for armor upgrades, that’s 8 damage per shot. Pikemen have 55 hp, 55/8=6.875, or 7 attacks to kill.
Parthian Tactics adds 2, so 10 damage per shot. 55/10=5.5 or 6 attacks to kill.
IMO the big point of persian cavalry archers would be to transition into Kamandaran. You could go for them in castle age and be FU+ for that age. Against enemy CA, you’d win basically everything. They’d be dealing 4 damage to your 6.
Compare this to Sipahi and you’ve got a tech that costs 50 resources less, is available from the archery range instead of the castle, and actually wins against Sipahi in castle age AND gives you gold for every kill.
Yes I should have been clearer and specified in late game. That is when I was thinking, as at first I thought that’s when it’d be more useful. in Castle persian CA are arguably the best with PT. But late game they’re not great.
However now that you bring it up, I’m thinking about it more, and in the mid-game pop cap is less of an issue, so you can mass 2-4 pikes per knight/elephant, and that’s a good counter. so you mix-in some CA to deal with the pikes.
And in castle age, you can either spend 300 res on leather archer armor for +1/+1 or 450 you get +1/+2 and +2 v pikes. So you don’t have to spend an extra 450 res to have above good CA, an extra 150 will actually get you above average CA just by opting for PT instead of leather archer armor.
But in the late game when you’re pop capped, while on paper halbs are a good counter they need to have a numbers advantage. You send 80 savar/EWE against 80 halbs and your halbs will get wrecked. Throw in a bit of siege and their toast. Obviously you’d never make just 80 halbs and call it an army, but just using that as an example. the Persian comp is very pop efficient, and Persians are good at booming and getting to that late game pop efficient composition.
So then If you have 60 surviving savar/EWE who can raid through your town very easily and shred buildings respectively it might not matter if you have the resources to endlessly trickle more halbs into the fight.
Sooooo yeah. Persian CA+PT might actually be just the buff for just when it’s needed. yeah, now that I think about it more from the time context, this might actually be really good in castle age.
If by some miracle persians are still struggling after all these buffs tho, i’d love to see Parthian tactics give more attk to both pikes and monks so that it’s also good in imp.
Admittedly that’d probably be some double or triple gold comp, and you could accomplish something similar with skirms (especially given the upcoming skirm buff v pikes) or trashbows but still. i think it’d be cool if more buffs are needed.
To be fair PT used to grant +4 to spears, but there was a balance change a while back where the HCA upgrade got two of the atk bonus and Parthian tactics kept the other two.
There has been a small push somewhat recently to make HCA more viable by making some of the upgrades less impactful. So if you’re missing PT your HCA aren’t as bad. With 80% accuracy HCA, they’re now somewhat usable w/o thumb ring.