Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

Definitely that would be fair. True, but her ability was in recruiting foreign leaders to side with her. Her retreating at the Battle of Actium was baffling at least in my opinion. Neither of these really are the makings of a 'hero,' but I am sure that there are some qualities to her I've missed. I would support this even though he was not ruling during the Golden Age, but that would definitely be contingent on Sparta having access to pikemen. While Iphicrates is hardly bad, he is again outside the scope of Athenian hegemony. Aristides would be a redundancy to me. Pericles fills the role of statesmen pretty well as is. Thucydides was a phenomenal historian; his quality as a general is difficult to assess as he is only known for being late to the Battle of Amphipolis. Another alternative I would offer would be for Cimon to be represented.

At the very least their removal and replacement should be strongly considered. 0 AD attempts to represent factions at their zenith. Cleopatra was reigning when the Ptolemies were in decline; she might be iconic, but that does not change the fact. Agis III reigned when Sparta was at most a minor regional power. The Spartan golden age could be considered immediately following the Peloponnesian War, but during the Persian Wars and up to the Battle of Leuctra would be a more general point. Agis IV died heroically, but so did many other kings. As a final note, having more hitpoints is just boring. Agesilaus II would be an objectively better king to select in my completely unbiased opinion. Iphicrates suffers from the same problem. The Golden Age of Athens could be regarded as from the Persian Wars up to the end of the Peloponnesian War. He is simply after that. I would argue for someone like Miltiades who could have a similar function.

Small typo there. Allow me to show how it could be rewritten: "I think Sparta without Spartans is weird, and it is also unique to have only one champion unit and let it be available early." Jokes aside, I don't see non-citizens as a champion being a good candidate despite the mechanics you proposed being interesting. Those individuals seemed to be rather rare. Xenophon probably only was able to get such an education for his children due to his personal friendship with Agesilaus. To me the skiritae unit virtually occupies the second champion slot despite being a citizen soldier. There are definite problems with its current state (why is it so slow?) that I think would make it not just a beefy legionnaire. Removing champions in fact might be a good way of improving diversity. Rome for instance, had horrendous cavalry compared to that of Carthage, leading to much of Hannibal's success, yet in game their consular bodyguards are considered first rate. I would strongly advise removing it to better establish Rome as a predominantly infantry and siege based civilisation. Why does the bodyguard exist? Because the commandments of game design dictated that all civilisations should only have two available champions at the time.

Keep in mind that building the Syssiton itself is an expense; supposing that there was no batch training possible and Spartans had something like a sixty second training time, I would hardly call that a completely broken mechanic. This could be coupled with their champions having reduced stats that improve with each subsequent phase. Making them spawn from the Civic Centre would make the Syssiton a redundancy, an unideal outcome. My point is that Spartans should be able to viably have Spartans at the beginning of the game in a way that is not a massive opportunity cost. Keep in mind that we are talking merely hypothetically, and calling such a mechanic either weak or overpowered is a false dichotomy without further experimentation.

I believe that I already outlined my opinion much earlier regarding a very obvious Spartan gimmick: Be able to train Spartans at phase 1. Simply speaking Sparta without Spartans is stupid. My proposal in a thread regarding ways to diversify champions included making making Spartan hoplites free as well, only offset by a lengthly recruitment time, two population, and a hard cap of one Syssiton in the Village Phase and +1 for each subsequent one. Technologies would be able to change the characteristics of its citizenry over time, making each Phase give an option to represent the political elements affecting Spartans.

Crush, Hack, and Pierce attack types do not have to conform to reality. Simply speaking there are plenty of abstractions as is. Swordsmen for instance dealing hack damage in the case of the legionnaire makes little sense as the gladius functioned primarily as a stabbing weapon. Likewise spearheads could oftentimes be used for cutting, as represented by medieval treatises on the matter. The terms hack, pierce, and crush are merely lovingly face-lifted from Age of Mythology. Yes, the terms generalise and are unoriginal, but they kind of work (outside of the fact that spearmen and pikemen suddenly become worse at demolishing buildings and destroying rams).

Again though, the conversation is always about equally numbered spears against cavalry. If we have 15 spearmen against 10 advanced sword cavalry, how does the fight play out assuming no micro? (I genuinely don't know since I do not have the game installed due to lack of available space) If I am not mistaken, mercenary cavalry cost a bit less, but I think the comparison is still fair. More importantly, how do you think it should play out?

Sword cavalry cost more than spearmen. Provided that spearmen handily beat cavalry when resources are balanced out, that is the relevant point.

Could somebody clarify the spearman versus sword cavalry matchup? How does rank 1 versus 1 play out? Obviously in most cases sword cavalry cost 150 resources, meaning that engaging against spearmen with a narrow win is already inefficient, yet at the same time spearmen are extremely slow, meaning that cavalry rarely have to take these unfavourable engagements. It is that problem that I believe makes sword cavalry difficult; their counter to them has no easy way of getting close enough to force fights. The question that we maybe should ask ourselves is if spearmen are not an adequate counter, what is?

Precisely. I don't necessarily want a naval superpower Sparta, but I would like there to be some niche options available to the faction in which a sudden new flood of naval units could pave the way for a landing, where they could really shine.

I'm not going to address all of these points, but I would raise a few key questions. Are you opposed to vaccines other than ones meant to deal with COVID-19? When you talk about vaccines being poison have you looked at each and every one? Have you consulted any medical experts prior to just writing them off as either gullible and ignorant or as wilfully spreading lies for their own self interest? Something tells me that people with years of training followed by even more experience in their respective fields would serve to have some legitimacy in the subject.

On the contrary they had a number of great successes in the latter half of the Peloponnesian War in part due to the genius of Lysander, but another major way in which they were able to turn the tide was through the funding of Persia. I could see there being a one time technology that would give x number of free ships to Sparta.

There are a few minor quibbles here and there, but as a whole it seems good. Is there any reason that the Seleucids remain unchanged aside from the library?

The spear/polearm being specifically designed to combat cavalry is a bit of an RTS convention; simply by virtue of much better reach spears were used by and large by all infantry regardless of whether they were facing cavalry or not. Whether a spearman would outperform a horseman one-on-one is a triviality in which matters of other equipment, training, etc,... complicate the matter. Even if the game does not embrace a battalion system, it would be nice for players to benefit from engaging in orderly formations. Even making it possible if only suboptimal would be a nice change of pace. I personally like to see my troops in proper battle lines, but the stand ground stance is annoyingly restrictive while the defensive stance goes too much in the other extreme.

That is an unfortunate aspect of the current gamestate. In the past there were a few ways the original team though that they could be more useful. These included making individual target random units in the formation in such a way that ranged units and melee could never focus fire a single unit. Others included a number of buffs and debuffs. Phalanx for instance made hoplites generally tougher at the expense of being slower. Seeing just a few of these ideas in the game could perhaps make the mosh pit battles a less common occurrence.