Thoughts on Spartan

[miral]

This thread is a general consideration of Spartan and a few suggestions to help new players. I am a old/new player. I have not played in 2 years or so and then started again with a larger screened vista computer. I got frustrated after I first got the game and started playing because: 1) I wanted to conquer the whole world, civ or alpha centauri like and 2) I started with the 2nd Pelop. War and Persian intervention. You cannot conquer the whole map in this game and this is an accurate reflection of the Greek World the game represents. There were over 700 city-states in classical Greece and even the greatest of these (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes) never had any chance of taking it all. I can now see that it was silly of me to be frustrated because the game is not a WWII total war fight to the end last side standing one. What gives the study of 4th and 3rd century BC Greece (and this game) its great interest is precisely this; it is like a chess game with hundreds of players and thousands of pieces.

Thus the pace of the game, in terms of changes to control of cities, developement of your cities and tech, ect. is slow. I believe it is meant to be slow. If you are prepared to accept that it takes a great deal of time to achieve a specific goal, much less great goals, and play with patience, then this game is wonderful. After the frantic pace of so many other war/strategy games I now find Spartan most satisfying.

Direct Persian intervention seems to me to make the game far too diffucult. But then, maybe I'm just not a very good player. I've always played a game for the enjoyment of it and never gone frantic working to always win at the highest level. But the game is so complex, not in its mode of play, but in the number of polis (polises?) and the concommitant mutiplicity of possible lines of action, that it is hard enough to do well against the other small states. If huge Persian armies suddenly enter in the middle of this it is most difficult to do anything.

I recommend the First Pelop. War scenario as the best, in terms of balance and overall complexity.

This is an excellent game that is seriously underated. This is probably because of the time period and its subtle victory conditions. After all, wargaming is dominated by WWII and, to a far lesser extent, Napoleonics, the Civil War, with a bit of WWI thrown in. There are probably more wargames about the Eastern Front in WWII that all others put together. This is too bad, as there are so many fascinating Medieval and Ancient wars that don't get games made on them.

Spartan (hate the name - the glorification of this nation of murderous, ingorant, slave drivers has always been beyond me; why was the game not called Athenian or, better yet since they broke the power of Sparta, Theban?) is a great game. It has unique features and a subtlety and depth of play that is wonderful. The Diplomacy section is exquisite in the number of original things you can do. And everytime you play the game and build new advances to buildings you discover how it changes the overall complexition of play. It is too bad that because of the dominance (tryanny?) of the WWII era that no further additions to Spartan will appear.

There are of course things that could and should be added or fixed. The lack of tactical naval warfare was noted and lamented from the inception of the game. The tactical land warfare, by the by, is just plain great fun. I find the game tends to have a 'slippery mouse', that is there is not real control of the cursor, which can sometimes seen to slip or flop about. And, most of all, most of all, please let me pray to every game developer that is and ever will be: DO NOT PUT OUT ANY WARGAME OR STRATEGY GAME WITHOUT A ZOOM FUNCTION. Zoom makes a game with a large and complex stragetic map, like Spartan, far easier and more fun to play. I don't understand anything about programing or computers (took me an hour and a half to get the Vista patch installed) so maybe there is some technical reason for a lack of zoom in Spartan but I regret this lack nonetheless.

The only game tip I have is that when you finish a specific Research level the game does not ask you if you want to continue with that same Research tech line or go to another. It will stay in the same type of Research, so watch this.

As far as developement of your empire strategy goes it depends far to much on which polity and which scenario you play to make even any generalizations. But, one line of developement that is always most useful is military technology and unit experience. After all, as Heinlein writes in Starship Troopers: 'violence, naked force, has settled more issues in human affairs that has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worse.' I think Thucydides would agree.

[anarchyintheuk]

Conquered the map once, just to see what the total resources/income were. No reason I can think of why you can't do it. After the 'completed scenario' screen comes up it allows you to contnue.

Hitting the Persian stacks at sea is the easiest way to eliminate them.

I never get too concerned w/ titles of games, unless they're inaccurate or just sound bad. As to Spartans being particularly repressive . . . probably 1/2 to 2/3 of all people living in Athens were slaves. Greeks only objected to the Spartan's enslavement of the Messenians because they were fellow Greeks, not because they had any overall objections to slavery itself. Seems too fine of a point to me.

Agreed on naval tactical warfare. Wish it had been included.

[miral]

Well, I'm not all that upset about the name. Of course, the Athenians practices slavery and had many bad customs, but you can't equate them with the Spartans. For instance, the Spartans singled out any young Helots who showed intelligence and competence, and murdered them. The Athenians never came near this sort of thing. A very interesting book on the subject, (well, 1/3 a book as he also covers Sherman and Hitler) is Prof. Hanson's The Soul of Battle, in the section on the great Theban general, and man, Epaminondas. He describes the horrors of the Spartan aparteid system very well and gives a fascinating account of the smashing of the power of that vile State.

You conquered the whole map!!! Wow, and again Wow! I am indeed impressed, at both the skill and the extreme patience it must have taken to do so. Well, you have given me a challenge. I shall attempt to conquer the known world. What difficulty level did you play at?

[anarchyintheuk]

Good points re Spartans, Thebans, et al.

At a certain point, conquering the map is just an excercise in patience not skill. [;)] Played at hard iirc.

[lordhoff]

ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk

At a certain point, conquering the map is just an excercise in patience not skill.

Have to agree. The easiest ethnic group to do this is Macedonian since they can build elite hoplites, light infantry, and cavalry. One gets such a large economy and so much excess that, even surprise attacks in the backwaters can be swiftly and brutally dealt with. I never got to the point of conquering all - it would have been just to tedious for me and not much of a challenge (again, after a certain size is reached).

[anarchyintheuk]

Macedonia has the easy access to gold and silver, didn't have much in the way of food iirc tho. While I'm waiting on AE I think I'll play Macedonia.