Spartan Royal Guard

[Raji]

Are the Spartan Royal Guard actually worth 8000 denari and 30 turns for recruitment?:hmmm:

[atraps]

i would say no, cuz in 30 turns u can recruit 30 other units which will do better then 1 spartan royal guard unit

[Maraxus]

But they look so Cool!

[Scutarii]

The 30 turns is really to discourage the player from recruiting to many of them: you should be relying on the initial unit and retraining it, which still takes 0 turns. It is worth it if you have a large wealthy empire, and Sparta eventually gets quite far away from where the real action is, so recruiting standard barracks troops from it becomes sort of useless, unless you can afford to recruit in every city (which you can't). So, yes and no.

[atraps]

Here is the result from 1 Spartan Royal Guard Unit vs. 30 Doryphoroi units (which is one of the weakest unit in XGM)



As you can see the SRG lost. Though recruiting 30 Doryphoroi units will cost you 12,000 denarii, 4,000 more then 1 SRG unit, and the upkeep of 30 Doryphoroi units will be quite alot more then 1 SRG unit.


p.s. the difficulty settings was medium, on grassy flatland.

[Roman Warlord]

I find them most useful when assulating stone walls, put them on and they can clear them against huge numbers.

Fights on stone walls all come down to power per man.

[Spartan198]

I changed their recruitment/cost to 1 turn/4000 dinarii, but still have yet to recruit more than two of them (I took Petras with a single unit of them! ).

I use periokoi hoplites more often for actual combat in regional (Greece only) conflicts, with the SRG as a pseudo-general's unit.

[Scutarii]

The problem with reducing their recuitment time to below 10 turns is the GCS likes to build them a lot once it gets a it of money. 1 turn recruitment and you'll be fighting a lot more than 300 of the buggers.

[rogergargantua]

The problem with reducing their recuitment time to below 10 turns is the GCS likes to build them a lot once it gets a it of money. 1 turn recruitment and you'll be fighting a lot more than 300 of the buggers.

I have their recruitment time at 5 turns and their costs at 4000 and I play as Romans. 75 a 100 turns after start I invaded Greece ( which empire stretches to whole of Seleucid grounds ). Turned out they had around 5 a 6 Spartan Royal Guard units in total and spreaded over different armies.

Its not like they build Spartans if they have money ( cuz in my game, they are financial richest and really dont have to worry about money ).

Still, in battle....they are very very hard to defeat. I always try to beat Spartans in close-combat. I dont like the way of shooting em down with slingers or archers....they dont deserve that
Its much cooler to defeat Spartans on their own ground: Close combat!

[atraps]

Still i think SRG is a underpowered unit. I think there stats should be increased a bit.

Results from Companions(Parthia) vs. SRG (medium difficulty)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Zarax]

Javelin armed cavalry and slingers tends to make short work of them though...
Once as Pontus I was assaulted by them handled by the AI, which made the mistake of having them scaling a ladder... Two units of galatian swordsmen helped by skirmishers killed them one by one...

[Solo1906]

I think - although I dont know that maybe the 30 turn recruitment, while excessive, is ment also to reflect the lack of Full citizen Spartan unit numbers, and their availability of this time in period in Sparta.

Sounds good at least - right?

[LucretiusTC]

I think - although I dont know that maybe the 30 turn recruitment, while excessive, is ment also to reflect the lack of Full citizen Spartan unit numbers, and their availability of this time in period in Sparta.

Sounds good at least - right?

Yep, here´s pretty good story about Spartan army and population decline:
http://asmalltowninlaconia.tripod.co...p_decline.html

"...a population problem existed arguably at the time of Pylos, where the Spartans were ready to sue for peace over a mere 120 Spartiates, and certainly by the time of Leuctra, where there were only 700 Spartiates altogether..."

"...after her defeat by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C., she lacked the manpower resources to recover her shattered prestige, and although in the 3rd century Agis IV and Cleomenes III tried to restore the old Sparta by promoting deserving periokoi to citizenship and redistributing the land, they were prevented from carrying out their reforms the first by internal opposition and the second by external opposition."

Luc.

[Publius Quirinus]

I think - although I dont know that maybe the 30 turn recruitment, while excessive, is ment also to reflect the lack of Full citizen Spartan unit numbers, and their availability of this time in period in Sparta.

Sounds good at least - right?

I like to pretend that when I'm training an SRG unit, I'm training a bunch of Spartan kids from childhood to the adult, deadly warriors they will be-- 30 turns equates to about fifteen years.

[Webba]

I like to pretend that when I'm training an SRG unit, I'm training a bunch of Spartan kids from childhood to the adult, deadly warriors they will be-- 30 turns equates to about fifteen years.

Heh! Not a bad idea at all. I think I'll give it a try.

[rogergargantua]

I like to pretend that when I'm training an SRG unit, I'm training a bunch of Spartan kids from childhood to the adult, deadly warriors they will be-- 30 turns equates to about fifteen years.

Yeah, but a unit of hypapsists ( or whatever how ya spell it ) is trained in 1 turn? And are quite lethal too.

Its cool to pretend like what you do, Quirinal...but if i try it ...i again discover that every unit is ageless once they are trained. Put em on the map and they never die ( unless being attacked ).

So thats why I put 5 turns of recruitment and 4000 gold. I am currently Romans and I want to fight as many Spartans as I can *going mad*.

To me, its quality vs quantity when it comes to recruitment time of Spartans. Spartans are indeed the best...but their recruitment time is insane and not quality justified compared to other units. I can build lots of armies in 30 turns.

[Publius Quirinus]

Its cool to pretend like what you do, Quirinal...but if i try it ...i again discover that every unit is ageless once they are trained. Put em on the map and they never die ( unless being attacked ).

Selective amnesia is very useful when roleplaying in RTW.

To me, its quality vs quantity when it comes to recruitment time of Spartans. Spartans are indeed the best...but their recruitment time is insane and not quality justified compared to other units. I can build lots of armies in 30 turns.

Yah...... it's possibly just because I haven't really played the GCS so much, but it seems to me that the Spartans are not all that more powerful compared to other elites, when you put the build time into account.

They're still an awesomely cool unit though.

[Agathon]

As for the SRG, Thukidydes informs us that the demagogue Cleon of Athens captured about 150 at the siege of Patras while taking the island of Sphakteria. Sending all those high class Spartiates to Athenian "Guantanimo" as POW's nearly knocked Sparta out of the Peloponnesian war, because it would have deeply compromised the gene pool of Sparta's eugenic ruling class to have lost in one action one-half of Sparta's SRG.

I think that those of us who read Hellenic history in general, and the history of the Athenians and Spartans specifically take things too literally when we should not, and too vaguely when we should be looking for precise source information.

Look at Leonidas and his three-hundred at Thermopylai: If that three-hunderd who died there to a man represented the entire citizen-army of Sparta, how did the Spartans recruit another three-hundred in time to fight for Pausanias at Plataia?

No. Herodotos tells us that Leonidas fought a holding action with his personal guard at Thermopylai as a gambit, hoping that his sacrifice would cause the council in Sparta to mobilize the rest (and read several hundreds or thousands here) of the Spartiate soldiery to defend Hellas from the Persians. I don't think Pausanias waited another fifteen years for a new generation of super-elite troops for the Spartan guards regiment (taxis).

I think I read somewhere that the average Spartan Phalanx consisted of a Taxis (regiment) on the right flank of Spartiates, another Taxis in the center of Allied contingents (Corinthians, Achaians, Arcadians and the like), and only the weak left was made up of local perioici companies.

And I don't think that Pausianias showed up at Plataia comming a detachment of Perioici only. There had to have been a larger military infrastructure in Lakedaiomia and Messania or all the stronger allies of the Peloponnesian League (read Corinth and Thebes) would have revolted and left with ease.

I concede that most of what I read about the Spartans comes from the classical and archaic eras (Sparta's golden age), but from what I've read about the Perioici, I've always imagined that they would have been more like Greek Militia Hoplites than elite line infantry.

[LucretiusTC]

As we know in the Classical era Spartan eugenic system of population control was reducing the citizen population dangerously (the so-called oliganthropia), the Messenian serfs were rebellious and the internal cohesion that had allowed Athenians to maintain its external hegemony was lacking in hierarchical Sparta. The alarming decline of Spartan citizens was also commented on by a certain Aristotle (382-322 BCE).

When this game starts around 280 BCE, we can´t compare to those Spartans to the days of Thermopylae. Surely they coudn´t field an equally strong army as they did for the battle of Plataea in 479 BCE. If we can believe the numbers that Herodotus gave, the Spartans sent 45,000 soldiers under the command of Pausanias , 5,000 Spartiates, 5,000 Perioikoi and 35,000 Helots; this was the largest single Spartan fighting force ever to appear in battle.

By the Peloponnesian War, the army of the Spartan Alliance was the largest and without doubt best trained in Hellas. However, the number of Spartans had diminished, to only 2,400 Spartiates. This shrinking manpower problem was to continue to plague Sparta. By the time of Agesilaus (reigned 400 - 360 BCE) that number had dropped to only 1,200 true Spartiates.

One obvious keypoint here was the battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. The Spartan army contained some 10,000 hoplites, 700 of whom were the elite warriors known as Spartiates. The Boeotians opposite them numbered only 6,000, bolstered by a cavalry superior to that of the Peloponnesians. Four thousand Peloponnesians were killed, while the Boeotians lost only 300 men. Most importantly, 400 of the 700 Spartiates on the scene were killed, a catastrophic loss that posed a serious threat to Sparta's future war-making abilities.

In late 370 BCE Epaminondas decided to capitalize on his victory by invading the Peloponnese and shattering Sparta's power once and for all. The loss of Messenia was particularly damaging to the Spartans, since the territory comprised one-third of Sparta's territory and contained half of their helot population.

Luc.

[Solo1906]

well said!