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When a crossbow bolt pierces a scotum and breaks the left arm of a legionaire, that legion has lost some of its combat power. Multiply that by thousands and you have a problem. I don't need to kill you to make less effective.
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Putting a a painful hole on the legionaire's arm, yes. It wouldn't break it, though, and I won't count on it to take my enemy out of the field. The thousands of arrorows the Parthians had to use to have the paralysing effect is telling.
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The only enemy that Rome ever faced that knew how to use a combined arms army was Hannibal. He only lost at Zama because Scipio manage to convince the Numidian Cavalry to change sides.
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Are you sure about that? The Parthians had infantry. Not good ones compared to the Romans, but nobody's were. The Rommans did successfully intergrate the Numidians into their formations, and a good deal of Sipio's convincing was done at the tip of the sword. I think a lot of those Chinese mounter archers were stepp mercenaries.
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The Gauls, Macedonians, Greeks, and Germans were mainly infantry types.
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I am not so sure about the Gauls. Ceasar's honor guards was heavy Gallic cavalry, and so were that of Vespesian and Titus. It is also clear that Gallic auxilliary cavalry was deployed as shock cavalry on the field. While the Romans depended on their heavy infantry to win their battles they were far from deprived in their selection of cavalry troops.
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Mark Anthony invaded Parthia with 100K troops and lost 1/3 that number without ever fighting the Parthians in a pitch battle. The main problem I have with the Roman army is they use a 1 size fits all approach to war, the heavy infantry. Don't get me wrong, the legion was very good. However, it took the Romans 400 years to figure out that what works against barbarian infantry does not work against cavalry base army of the Parthians and Sassanids.
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That was, if I am not mistaken, after Ventidius wiped out two Parthian field armies with classic defensive infantry tactics against cavalry. Anthony lost most of his men to exposure and disease than battle after having his own line of logistics cut. Again, I don't see either empire as having a clear tactical advantage against the other.
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Terrain is what did in the Persians against the Greeks.
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Terrain forced the Persians to give up a measure of their superiority in numbers. Yet they still lost every head-on battle against the Greeks; their missile fire and cavalry charges failed to bring the Greeks to heel. All this says is that a light cavalry and infantry army can take a pure heavy infantry force in terrain favorable to cavalry movement and has long fields of fire. Which is IMHO not a lot.
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Alexander was a special case. He was a genius and he commanded the Persian army, he would still have won.
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Alexander was a military genius in that he defeated an empire a league above the Greeks in wealth and power in record time with inferior numbers and limited resources. It was never in doubt that the Greeks could lick the Persians in any tactical battle when they could muster a force large enough to ensure that the Persians could not defeat them by movement alone. Xenophon cut his way out of Persia with 10,000 Spartans and Athenians--a number totally inadequate to hold any permanent ground and no supplies out of what they could obtain by waste and pillage--against what the empire could throw at them. The fact that they made it out suggest that the Persian military system was seriously flawed. Btw Alexander's infantry had only lost one straight up fight againts the Persians and that was his left wing in Guagamela. Without his elite cavalry Alexander would have been forced to take more casualities thus limiting the scope and range of his conquests but he probably would not have lost.