Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

For the Ptolemies, you could also reference Isis and Anubis, two major Egyptian deities that were also worshipped during that time.

Persian: "Am I a joke to you?" For reference, Saint Nicholas was from Asia Minor, so him looking Persian isn't the worst idea.

I think racism is perhaps the wrong term, but I will admit that it can feel uncanny. That said, this practice is nothing new. The original Amanra did have a bit of an accent. Ultimately, I think that they should have had gone the 300 route and made them all speak proper Glaswegian.

The uncanny god art is something else though.

The idea of Saturnalia falling on the 25th doesn't quite match with when Christmas was initially established. A better explanation comes from an estimate that Jesus died on the 25th of March. Since he was important, they assumed that he was conceived on that day, leading to his birth nine months later. Biblical Scholar Dan McClellan offers basically the same explanation if you want to hear it from a PhD.

I did. The reason I gave a vague answer was because I have not sorted through the pertinent sources and looked at scholarly work surrounding them enough to come to a decisive opinion. I have no problem with regarding the helot class as oppressed, but the dystopian picture Devereaux paints seems frankly unsustainable precisely because there were so many helots. Maybe I am wrong, and I would love to delve into the topic further, but at the moment, I will content myself with positioning my stance as inconsequential at best. The issue I found with his analogy was the ignoring of any positive elements of the education. Were Spartans literate? No, but that does not mean that they were ignorant in a time in which oral traditions were prevalent. It is little surprise that surviving Spartan literature came in the form of poetry, which would have particularly thrived in an oral society. Fair enough. In seeing it, I naively assumed that there would be further scholarly work by the author to steelman the arguments, but it was foolish of me to gloss over some of its fallacious claims. The point I was trying to get across more was that this article contrasted Sparta with its contemporaries, which I much prefer to say making it out to be ancient Nazis. I think a good number of my issues with the article lie in the overt tone that he uses that just gives the arguments a blunt feeling. Likewise, I likely just dislike modern comparisons to ancient things; it feels as jarring as someone condemning how terrible of a Mormon Shakespeare was. Frankly, those are opinions I should not let cloud my judgement as much as it did.

Fair, yet I find the idea of him projecting trauma onto Spartans to be problematic. Don't get me wrong; the educational system was harsh and did cause suffering, but the extent to which this led to psychological trauma is uncertain, and much of his arguments for this hinge on extreme views of child mortality, participation within the crypteia (and killing a helot being a must to become a Spartan), and extensive practise of pederasty. That is a tricky question to really say, but I would argue that they were about at the same level of other servile classes like Athenian slaves. Certainly the fact that they could and did at times rise from that class is good, but the fact that they were systematically attacked shows other problems. The fact of the matter is that like other downtrodden social classes, their voices and presence were always in the background of history, and I am perfectly okay with at my level of knowledge having a fairly agnostic view on the level of suffering they did or did not enjoy. What irked me with the article however, was this idea that all boys had to kill helots as a sort of rite of passage into manhood. Hodkinson rightly notes that the skills of the crypteia would give would have little battlefield utility, and rather, it would seem to be a way of finding the best of what could make up the future Spartan leadership as they worked with minimal instruction, acting on their own initiative.

This isn't Sparta seems like a questionable bit of scholarship to me for other reasons. First, he overtly psychoanalyses his sources into what seem to be cardboard cutouts. The fact of the matter is that while he argues they were snobby for disliking democracy, all of them had legitimate issues with the dysfunctionalities present in Athens given the abuses of power of various demagogues, the unjust execution of the admirals following Arginusae, and most obviously Socrates. Also with infanticide, there is no reason to regard it as unique or even as necessarily something that did happen. https://www.archaeology.org/news/10231-211214-greek-exposure-infanticide. Also, he seems to put too much weight on the weakest source: Plutarch, while dismissing Xenophon's more first hand experience. While I think there is insufficient data to weigh in decisively on the extent pederasty, Xenophon's witness is an important basis to cast doubt on it being a widely done practice. Quite frankly, I find the accounts of brutality to just as likely to have been exaggerated by Athenians when juxtaposing the two. He also criticises the education system on the idea of literacy as if that were a sole metric of learning. Much of education during that time revolved around memorising oral traditions. Honestly, it feels strange that he is comparing it to modern standards when Sparta was hardly worse in some respects to Athens, which had a similar fraction of its populace capable of actually participating in the democracy and similarly relied on slavery which was likely in some cases as brutal. The following blog post does a better job of representing that. https://spartareconsidered.blogspot.com/2018/02/of-slaves-and-helots-short-comparison.html I would also recommend an excellent article by Hodkinson "Was classical Sparta a military society?" It also does a lot to provide a more nuanced take on Spartan life. Devereaux actually does interact with Hodkinson in a later post, and I would be intrigued to further read on that.

I think it would be vital to have dedicated transports; that was the case for many important campaigns like Hannibal's.

And I would not disagree with you. In fact first, I would stress that the fortress replacement would be a cheaper and weaker structure. Second, this is not an attempt to model Spartan colonisation. The point I was drawing with Tarentum is that Sparta did not have much anything to do with it. Exchange between colony and home city generally required two things: ship routes (of which Sparta had none of) and commercial activity (of which Sparta also did not practise). In this sense constructing additional Civic Centres does not model Spartan expansion too well. Instead this is to represent the garrisons Sparta installed in cities, mirroring the way that Sparta following the Peloponnesian War propped up numerous pro-Spartan oligarchies. Again this is why it could perhaps be buildable in allied territory.

This more or less. I would add that it should not be a resource drop off point and be exclusively for training champions as you mentioned.

This is true, but it was hardly an aggressive coloniser like Athens or Corinth. Likewise, its colonies functioned differently from others due to a major idea behind why most other city-states established theirs: trade. Like later colonial effort, many colonies were a means of the parent state exporting finished goods to the colony for commodities. Spartan interest for this was practically minimal, and the motive behind their founding Tarentum, perhaps their most prominent colony, only came after an internal crisis following the Messenian Wars. Basically a fortress like structure could better represent their mode of expansion especially following the Peloponnesian Wars and would help identify them as a centralised civilisation that only expands to make small pockets of territory for key resources.

The point I would make is that it is arguable that Perioikoi made up the majority of these sorts of fighters. I would see Helots workers becoming military units as only possible through upgrading them as mentioned above. This would fall in line with the fact Spartans were highly paranoid when it came to their Messenian labour due to the constant risk of rebellions. Those that would fight on campaigns would be freed of this serf class because they now had the capacity to be a major threat. Instances of Spartans doing this include a reference by Thucydides mentions this in Book IV, 26. I am not advocating for the removal of Helot Citizen-Soldiers (Neodamodeis), but Helots that are trained as Citizen-Soldiers from the start. Basically the change I am asking for is a purely cosmetic one. Helot Skirmishers that are trained would become Perioikoi Skirmishers. By the same token, Perioikoi Cavalry would just become Allied Cavalry. Also, I would note that there is a technology already introduced that introduces Neodamodeis as a unit. I would say that this unit can be retained simply by calling them 'Brasidians, in reference to particularly exemplary Helot fighters. As for your other points, I think they are reasonable compromises. Functional gameplay should be the priority after all. One matter I did learn that is rather intriguing is that Spartans were actively encouraged to hunt according to Xenophon, which makes me think that perhaps Spartans themselves could play a role in hunting in the early game to represent this fact. They could be inefficient perhaps, but it's a thought.

While I don't disagree that the gymnasium would be a redundant feature that would be hard to justify from a gameplay function, it is somewhat ironic since the practice of publicly exercising naked was original to Spartans. I think that the Dromos could be interesting, but I would much prefer something that could change up gameplay, and I think one option would be to make it so that Spartans could not make more than one Civic Centre and future expansion would be done with a weaker, cheaper fortress, much like the Bulgarian Krepost in Age of Empires II. The appeal I find to this is that during the post-Peloponnesian War era, Sparta extended its authority by establishing garrisons in other cities like Thebes, and this could be a cool way of representing that. Better yet, it could be unique as a structure you could build in allied territory as a means of supporting or even coercing them depending on the way diplomacy functions in a game.

That kind of makes me think that the theatre could be available in the Town Phase for Athens, to later be upgraded in the City Phase. The key point is that I don't see it feeding well into Sparta's cultural identity. Athenian theatre has a long and rich history, starting from the tragedians to Old Comedy and finally New Comedy. If we want a structure with a similar function (namely expanding territory), it should relate to how Sparta conducted its imperialistic ambitions: governmental ideology. During the time of Lysander especially, Sparta went about installing oligarchies, including the infamous 30 Tyrants of Athens. This could be represented with their Gerousia structure, which would have the added bonus of having a bunch of yelling whenever you click on it (Sparta famously conducted voting by the loudest side winning). It's well established according to Plutarch at least that Spartan houses were a lot rougher looking than other city-states. Wikipedia, citing a pretty reputable looking source, does note that the best reference for Spartan houses comes from Messenia, where the houses had stone foundations and clay walls.