I was thinking that it might be better to just mirror the present aesthetics: since the sword is "equipped" but the shield is not (unlike on the coins, but I guess to show the armour better), the sword position would be more important that the shield's, so maybe you could put the sword on the left (instead of the right), and the shield on the right (instead of the left), keeping the aesthetic reasons and making the equipping of gear more accurate (one could think that some time after the coins were made, the shield fell and was put in this new position ).

I thought, as with Bibasis, to present better a few of the most straightforward propositions I made long ago for the Spartans with some icons (some of which clearly need to be improved). Kleroi civ. bonus: Spartiate land allotments where helots lived and farmed. Also, their farmlands were among the most fertile. This would give more efficient fields (and could compensate for my proposal of removing their advanced agricultural tech).   Scytale civ. bonus: transposition cipher for communications, since 7th c. BC, often associated with the Spartans, although it's somewhat controversial. This would increase FOV, to compensate for a civ that shouldn't be fast (lack of cavalry).   Murex Fishing tech: instead of Fishing Nets (which have existed for thousands of years!). The Greeks were not that big in fishing, much less the Spartans, while "the murex mollusc" was used to obtain "royal purple", and "among the Greeks the Lakonians and Tarentines were leading producers". This would make fishing boats give some additional metal coin.   Bribe Gerontes tech: something that Spartan kings did. If there are structure abilities with a cooldown, it would work better as such. This would make Heroes a bit more powerful, for a metal coin price.   I ran out of free AI images when trying to make a Cleomenes III Reforms tech icon, but I wasn't having good ideas on how to represent that in a simple way anyway.  

I don't insist on keeping it but it was actually on purpose, as I imagined the shields to be made out of stone instead of metal. I'm not sure about if I used parallax the right way though, you might want to check :)

An example from Athens to work with

Indeed. I was mentioning something similar with the Theban shipyards. And I've discussed with @Emacz how much less monumental the Spartans were compared to the Athenians. Having different models could also be useful for any mod that wants to include building upgrades (civ allowing), which I've also proposed for Towers. These things would make civs more unique, and make gameplay more interesting.