This sounds good to me . Meaning, as the game progresses, you need to keep them alive somehow.    Im curious why you have this though. Just to counteract the fact you will have less champions and consequently less helots?

Ok yeah, that would work… they could get an attack bonus like city states as part of their grouping… and then as they phase up they get additional attack bonuses that don’t happen to other civs. But they won’t have some of the protection, auras that other units have.  I can put place holders in for all of this… but will take lots of play time to figure out the right balances. And I can’t really do that by playing against myself any volunteers to play/test mp with me?!??

What i meant was: you can make hoplites, Macedonian phalanx, Roman infantry etc benefit from auras, and make tribal warriors a bit beefier and not benefit from auras so they pack a punch in single combat but lose to formations in similar group numbers. But, of course, the differences should be small enough so as not to break the game.

So again, they aren’t restricted. They are stronger than regular champ spearman, especially once they are fully promoted. But when you go p2, they take an additional 10% train time. When you go p3, they take an additional 15% on top of that. And a few of their techs add additional train time. So unless you play death match with cheats, or a game for hours it’s harder to replenish/mass them. On the othetide of the equation Perioikoi take 10% less train time in p2 and an additional 10% less p3… so you can basically train 3 periokio in the time it takes to train one spartiates.

I agree with @Thalatta, idea is to only restrict Champion spearmen for Spartans additionally. And balance the stats so they kick backsides even in low numbers.