Sparta has no eco bonus and the buildings they use to train those champions are expensive. If you find a way to attack early with other civs that can boom faster such as gauls or germans or ptolemies then you might have a chance of not needing to fight the hoplites.

They get armor but not dmg from the forge. Also the splash buff and unit preference behavior change they received in a28 is quite significant. In my opinion they can be very strong in this alpha.

This is true, at lease by checking the stats in-game. Only Will to Fight affects Elephant melee attacks.

soldier_attack_melee_0X.json "affects": ["Soldier !Elephant"], Test it out in-game. edit: Has been so in 0.27 as well, so that melee elephants are not affected by melee upgrades has been in the game for a while.

One of the frustrating things about modding is how difficult it can be to get the mod to work with other people.  I'm currently using git hub (kinda a newb)  i share the git link: Emacz2/classical-warefare-aea and i have them download the zip, they extract to their mod folders, it shows up, they host games but still grayed out.  I am aware of the naming issue.  For example if one is  called: Classical-Warfare-AEA and the other is classical-warfare-aea you cant join games.... but what if they are exactly the same and you still can't?!?  What other issues could be causing it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.