Behold the beautiful Aegean in all its glory!
Spartan has several different campaign maps but the best is obviously the grand campaign map which allows the player to choose any city state in the entirety of ancient Greece, from the Peloponnese through to northern Thrace, over the Hellespont and into Asia minor and Bithya (modern day Turkey) and there are alot of different sides to pick some with stronger starting positions than other but still the choice is there and it can be pretty satisfying to be the underdog and choose say Byzantium and conquer half of ancient Greece.
Graphically the game is pretty good overall, the battle mode certainly isn't up to par with more modern strategy games (but then again Rome Total War looks like a dog these days) and as typical with 2d games, they age much better than their 3d brethren (again Rome total war!) but the 2D strategy map is great, the Aegean and Greece never looked so good on a computer game with rich colours giving variety to the terrain and group of trees everything is bright, detailed and vivid only a minor niggle with it all is the campaign mini map is way to small and can be difficulty to tell where hostile armies are.
When you click on a city you go to that cities screen and can choose to build what and where and you'll see the structures you build appear round the village/town/city centre again everything looks acceptable and quite good overall.
With the battles, you can actually choose to use the '3d' option (slitherine was experimenting with a 3D battle engine since they got slaughter in reviews for previous games for having the dreaded 2d graphics!!) which looks pretty naff to be honest with slightly out of proportioned men running at each other or the 2d - it features the same units but the view is fixed , terrain looks a little different and there's actually blood effects, so as a personal preference I switched to the 2d graphics asap on discovering there was such an option.
Another aesthetic I like about Spartan is the actual art used as screens in the game, it genuinely looks good - the diplomat faces are varied from one another and look unique, the background art on some of the screens e.g. main screen/empire view /battle results is good and the icons used to represent happiness/trade goods etc suits the Greek setting perfectly.
Sound wise, it's pretty Spartan (ho ho ho!), there's only one music track, it's quite a long music track mind you ticking in at 8:39 and its actually good, ended up putting it on my MP3 player, very atmospheric piece of music and while not 'genuinely' copying what one might consider Greek like/Mediterranean music (usually soft string music) it certainly fits the game and when the piece does change 'style' throughout it can fool one into thinking it's going into an entirely different track and just blends from one to the other seamlessly. I would have liked there to have been a few more tracks to the games soundtrack of similar style and quality but what one there is, it's very good , quite relaxing (although in one 'games journalist professional' review they said the music made them fall asleep!)
The music though for the battles does get quite boring very quickly it doesn't sound exciting or fast paced for a battle!
Beyond the music there's distinctive authentic Greek responses from units (none of this lowest common denominator accented rubbish which is sadly common these days) and slightly different from ethnic group to ethnic group, in battle there's a few different sounds for soldiers marching/charging/routing/rallying etc but not allot of sounds but sufficient none the less.
Game play is Spartans strongest point, as mentioned you can pick any state you want on the campaign maps there's a few different cultural/ethnic groups which effect diplomatic relations (to a small extent) and army recruitment - for example Lakedaimonia (spartans) are the only ones able to recruit Spartiates most other Greek states get elite hoplites as their heaviest infantry except Macedonia might get Argyraspides etc so the sides are suitably varied.
When you click on a city you display a city screen and choose to build what you want depending on the cities resources - of which there are, gold, silver, iron, copper, wood, food and bricks with gold silver and iron being relatively rare, food essential and bricks very important (there never seems to be enough of them available once you start expanding!) and wood and copper important for troop recruitment so there's a bit of strategy in deciding what city to annex next , build what and where (I tend to specialise some of the more safe cities to just food/brick/copper production) and cities can only be upgraded (allowing more plots to be built on) depending on their 'brick' resource level, so a level 3 brick resource will only allow that city to be a 'large village' which restricts some building (higher level buildings like wanders etc) so again you can devote a fair bit of strategic thinking in just the management of your cities. A nuisance that occurs during play however is the 'happiness' of a city, its a normal thing (unfortunately) for strategy games to have cities potentially revolt or have their production hindered by low happiness but its annoying, not as bad as the dreaded 'squalor' rubbish in rome and medieval total war 2 but still pretty irritating to have a city go unhappy and no unit production avaliable - and its tricky to get rid off unless you station yet more troops, or knock down a building to devote to a temple ad the worse is caused by over crowding - I personally modded the hell out of this annoyance so garrisons have twice the effect when stationed in a town due to the annoying unhappiness levels that eventually occur.
Off course you'll need to expand so you can recruit a unit of each type from a city (if it has the right barracks) and you can have up to 16 units in each army, the types you can choose are light cavalry, heavy cavalry, peasants, light infantry, skirmishers, heavy infantry and generals (and for some factions archer barracks) and there's usually 3 different levels of troops to each barracks, so with a heavy infantry barracks you get for a faction like Byzantium Proto hoplites at level 1, hoplites at level 2 and elite hoplites at level 3 etc.
Once your army is ready you merely click on it during the campaign map and can click somewhere else for it to move and it'll use up its movement points - simple and elegant system which is used by most strategy games (this was used before in earlier Slitherine games long before Rome Total War) once your army makes contact with an enemy army/city you get a option to automatically fight the battle - this usually is ok but results in greater casualties I find than directly controlling a battle itself by a large margin.
If you decide to attack the AI you get presented with a deployment screen and the set up you choose and order options are essential, you can have several different formations for some units (line/square etc) and order them to charge, slow advance, stay still for a little while, hold ground, engage with enemy without throwing javelin's/shooting bows (pretty much covers it) which isn't a whole lot of options but it suffices, the terrain actually makes quite an impact on infantry engagements, for example light infantry will demolish heavy infantry in swamps but I didn't notice much of a difference for skirmishers being placed on higher ground which was a shame but anyway then, when you're happy with set up you press ok and then the battle map is displayed showing the armies opposing each other and closing in.
You don't actually have control over the armies which is jarring to alot of people at first (and most of the 'professional games journalists' ) so you sit back and just enjoy the battle - in 3d mode you can swivel the camera around zoom in etc but it doesn't look very good, quite barren with no discernable details for skies etc so I prefer the fixed 2d look which will actually display blood. Archers will have little impact unless there's a mob of troops which are being held up by your own lines unlike say, Rome total war when archers suffered from 'lord of the rings' syndrome were a heavily armoured warrior will get brought down by a single arrow from a short/long bow so in a sense combat is fairly realistic in that the general only had limited control over the course of the battle, you can try and rally troops as they flee though which often makes a huge difference in a battle and at the end results are displayed, healed and gain experience.
While the battle mode is 'ok' it's not fantastic, a greater control of soldiers would have been well appreciated along with a bigger battle map, furthermore all the infantry behave the same way so it is terrible simplistic at times, they move in formation at first then run in disorganised mobs attacking each other with horsemen attacking like infantry (charge and stand there fighting) and once the battle is decided all the soldiers run all over the place which looks quite comical at times .
You can choose to fight a battle but fast forward it (very fast forward!) to quickly get it out of the way which is appreciated.
Playing the game you also need to adjust research and throw all your research points into one slider - food/gold/copper etc etc to get new advances which might offer say new infantry barracks, all good stuff but when I was playing as Crete which has the 'Illyrian/pirate' ethnic group, the best troops I could get were level 3 heavy infantry (veterans) which I got whenever I captured a enemy with a elite heavy infantry barracks or built a large fortress HOWEVER I couldn't actually build a heavy infantry barracks on my own with the necessary tech level researched instead I had to actually conquer a enemy city and hope they had built a elite heavy infantry barracks to be able to recruit from...very strange and doesn't appear to be a bug!!
I will say this for sure in Spartans favour, the AI is quite a challenge at times on both the strategy map and battle map, on the lower difficulties the AI is lobotomised, think Rome Total War bad, but put it on hard or greater difficulty levels and it's a fun challenge to defeat, it will marshal armies up quickly and actually group them into huge/very large single army stacks and send them at you in a few waves, rebuild and try again and on the battle map sometimes varies its strategy - to test this I fought a battle 4 times in a row saving/reloading was quite surprised to see that I lost one of those battles utterly even with a better equipped army only being slightly outnumbered by the AI, the other three battles I won but with two of those battles had less than a quarter men left.
The battle went something like this, I had 6 skirmisher units which is quite alot, with a few low grade infantry , 4 low grade heavy infantry and the rest mid range light infantry against 16 light infantry of mixed quality on the AI side and 1 garrison unit of lowest quality light infantry, the AI in the battle I lost set most of the troops opposite my own and I ordered all mine to hold ground and wait for the AI to get peppered by archers, the AI obliged sending the bulk of its army BUT held back two units of its better quality light infantry and once there infantry closes with our own - infantry will seek them out once close enough so there was a relatively big gap in my lines then the AI charged forward its remaining troops who cut all my skirmishers up and got behind my main lines and cut them to pieces.
Quite surprised, albeit that is the brightest I've seen the AI in Spartan but it beats the hell out of anything I had seen in total war games post Medieval Total War 1 (still the best), usually the AI will cluster its forces on one flank (as was done historically) to beat one half of the army and chew up the rest.
To add a little 'spice' and mix things up throughout the game there are random events - historically ones like a new king for a state, Socrates death etc to random ones like barbarian uprisings, pirate raids along with yearly updates on food production.
Then there are invasions, the mighty Persian empire decides to invade with huge armies throughout the game and the Roman Republic sends armies to attack Greece from West and both are very powerful with very good armies - the Persians off course have an emphasis on archers and cavalry while the Romans on heavy infantry.
Now it's a good idea to have these invasions, they do add another element of fun to the proceedings however they happen WAY WAY WAY to soon in the game given their strength, most of the map will be Persian and Roman by turn 200 with their seemingly never ending reinforcements - thankfully you can mod the Persian/roman invasions so they either never occur, or as I prefer it happen around turn 300-350 (to do this you need to edit two text files in the Spartan directory, date - maps - grand campaign and edit EventInvasion.txt and events.txt and change "IF ( ( turnCounter >" to something like '350' for after turn 350 but make sure both the text files display the same "IF ( ( turnCounter >" values otherwise you'll still get early invasion!!
n the 'events.txt' file you need to scroll down to find the invasion details but
ANYWAY if you do decide to edit it like that the Persian invasions will meet stiff resistance from the AI - at least at first instead of crumbling away and there'll be a few big states - usually in my modded games this will be Bithyani, Macedonia, Messenia, Athenians, Boetians, Thracians)
But without modding it, the invasion events while intended to provide a fun challenge are just overkill and annoying which leads onto my next point regarding the ...
Longevity of the game, well in Spartan there's a huge number of states to play, a few campaign maps (most are small though and over too quickly) and each state has its own victory conditions - amass silver, build large temple complexes, built a wonder, capture cities and these specific ones, this is all well and good but they are far far too easy to achieve!
You only need to capture something like 24 cities as the Spartan faction that'll be about a third of Southern Greece if that, I can't help but get the feeling that due to the insane Persian and later roman invasions that the winning conditions had to be kept simple and easily achievable so as to offset the stale late game with the inevitable Persian dominance. The effect is quite bad overall because it means you'll rarely fight it out to the latter technology levels within the a normal games time frame unless you deliberately go around your objectives to conquer towns /withhold building/acquiring necessary resources to achieve victory conditions for the side you might choose. You can however choose to continue playing after attaining victory which is nice and all but a little disappointing that you'll not be sufficiently challenged during a campaign game to actually need to research all tech trees.
The game does have multiplayer though...over gamespy but it is quite fun and it actually has the campaign map on the multiplayer so there's both the turn based strategy and the real time battles.
Another weakness to the game is the rather poor diplomacy, you have only a few options and can't actually make alliances meaningful ones anyway were you help each out, and you need foreign ministry built in your capital to access different diplomatic options, there are indeed quite a few options but it's so unimportant in the game you can get by without looking at the screen, - and with the options those do extend to how you can make foreign diplomats..disappear from eye gouging to the tame escorting to the states boarder and being released.
But in conclusion, Spartan is a very good game, especially given that it was made by a small company (Slitherine) it's quite cheap these days (sold out software label for 5 pounds about 7 bucks) but if you buy it over the official website it's a ridiculous 20 pounds and when on the forums someone asked why one of the founders of the company said they base the price on game play ...HMMM how every Jeff Vogel! LULZ!
but anyway quite inexpensive so worth picking up - oh and you can get a windows vista fix from the official site and publishers site.
Pros:
.Superb 2d graphics on the campaign map
.Lovely campaign map music
.Lots of strategy
.battles can be ok
.random events do add to the game
.Art style is nice
.huge number of sides to play as
.qutie a few campaign selections
.some multiplayer
.cheap these days
.determined AI on higher difficulties
.can choose between 2d and 3d
Cons:
.multiplayer is gamespy
.battles are limited in options and scope
.diplomacy is far too unimportant
.invasion events are mixed at best
.doesn't feel like there's enough units
.limited amount of music overall
.repetitive battle music
.3d graphics are poor
.infantry and cavalry behave the same like disorganised mobs
.winning conditions are to easily achieved