Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

You and Geneva make relevant points, and I am not against Hippocrates being present in the game to some capacity or another. At the very least he would make a fantastic hero for a campaign. That said, the main point I would still stress is that he did not establish at least to my knowledge any medical school to continue his traditions. After all he did wander. This is not discounting his massive contributions to the medical field; I would just note that they do not strike me as particularly Athenian in nature. If we contrast that with the case of Plato and Aristotle, the ruins of the Academy and the Lyceum show obvious impact for Athenian culture. While I am in no way wishing to disrespect Socrates, I think for the reason of his being executed makes his inclusion as a hero as controversial as Alcibiades as an Athenian hero. I would put forward Plato or Aristotle or the choice of one of the two as ShadowofHassan already said. While we're at it, Zeno for the Stoic school and even Epicurus could be depicted, but perhaps leaving it at just two would be preferable. I think that having the option revolve around garrisoning the philosopher in a building to boost its efficiency might be good. Perhaps in one case it could increase the work rate as Wowgetoffyourcellphone mentioned. The other could provide discounts to costs.

I will admit that this is a bit of a quibble, but this would not be the first time a hero has changed for similar reasons. Xenophon used to be an Athenian hero, which was quite strange given his devotion to Sparta. Also, by having Hippocrates as a hero for Athens, we shaft actual Athenian physicians such as the admittedly legendary Agnodice or perhaps the more relevant Aristotle, who did clearly make some advances in biology. Regardless of that, I think representing the Athenian place in philosophy would be much better than its place in medicine by depicting a man from Kos. The point is that the gameplay effect could remain the same; let's just change the name. As for the matter of Marian Reforms, if that seems problematic, we could use different term like Professionalisation, Professional Reforms, or just Reforms. I could get behind that since it would make the incongruity of having Marian reforms without Marius disappear.

With Alpha 27's release, there are many things I appreciate about the design improvements. One thing, however, that I think is a problem is the implementation of Hippocrates for Athens. Simply speaking, he was not Athenian, being born on the island of Kos. While he probably travelled to Athens, he was an itinerant physician. Having non-combat heroes is a good idea, but I think there are some much more obvious and much more Athenian choices. Ones such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle come to mind, but also depicting the theatre side with people like Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, or Menander could also be welcome.

Next thing you'll be telling me that Νικη didn't found the shoe brand.

I think that having one of the walls match the contour of the roof within the courtyard might make it look better (as per the reference picture). Also, do note that there are some windows on the back of the reference picture that would help to make the back of the building work better. As a final suggestion, having the supporting posts be made of wood I think makes more sense than the stone and ties better with the reference.

This topic is near and dear to my heart since it defined Athenian identity. Namely, I refer to olives and how they could be represented. If this has already been implemented in some form since I last played, my apologies. Olive technology or bonus: Simply by having a technology or bonus that makes Athenian farmers produce metal alongside food would be one easy step in representing their use. It does, however, perhaps leave some to be desired in giving interesting choices. Trade technology: Olives were important primarily for facilitating trade, and having perhaps two technologies that represent that would be nice since it could also introduce a way of depicting black and red figure ware as the technology names, a nice nod to their prolific pottery. Unique farm: much like Age of Empires 3, there could be a farm that produces only metal. Since this would probably require a new farm asset, it is perhaps the least most desirable option. I am well aware that the farm related bonuses would feel redundant when Athens already has a mining bonus. One way of solving that would be to make the mining bonus only unique to Themistocles. Although the mine does seem to have been known prior to his day, he was the one who harnessed it for the production of triremes.

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.