Well instead of making people do the extracting and installing, they can just drag and drop the mod on the running game in windowed mode it will install the mod correctly on all platforms.
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.