Sparta (Wrath of Sparta) Faction: An entirely militarised culture, the Spartans are truly a force to be reckoned with. However, despite Sparta’s command of Greek forces during the recent Greco-Persian Wars, and its noble sacrifice at Thermopylae, Athenai’s own victories have dramatically increased its prestige, and war with Persia is high on its agenda. Hi-dee-ho people. Been playing a lot of CA's latest campaign (Wrath of Sparta) and I'm digging it. I felt like something was missing with the unit roster though, so I cooked this little unit pack up. The vast majority of Hellenic melee units are fighting hoplite style with a spear and shield, so I made these units to add some variety to the roster.

Buy Total War: ROME II - Wrath of Sparta Campaign Pack as a Steam Key.

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Wrath of Sparta introduces an entirely new, epic campaign expansion for Total War: ROME II focusing exclusively on the Hellenic world, plunging players into the turbulent events of the iconic Peloponnesian Wars.

The year is 432 BC, and unrest grows throughout the Greek City-States. At a gathering of the Peloponnesian League, prosperous Athens has earned the enmity of Sparta, Korinthos and the Boiotian League, tipping the delicate political balance past the point of no return.

While the other factions hold a loose alliance against Athenian arrogance, each state has its own agenda. The future of Greece itself is at stake, and the ensuing conflict will result in nothing less than supremacy of the Hellenic world.

Meanwhile, the mighty Persian Empire is watching, waiting, and preparing its armed forces to turn this tide of Hellenic turmoil to its own advantage…

Wrath of Sparta features:

New Campaign Map
The earliest period any Total War game has depicted, Wrath of Sparta’s campaign map is a vivid and detailed representation of the Greek world in 432 BC; featuring 22 provinces across 78 regions, covering the Greek mainland, islands and the Ionian coast. The map brings 12 new Wonders to light, including the Ruins of Troy, the Temple of Zeus and the Royal Tombs of Makedon. Furthermore, as the campaign features a tighter timeframe than the ROME II Grand Campaign, each turn represents one month.

Four Playable Factions
Athens (Athenai), Corinth (Korinthos), Sparta and Boiotia are all playable in Wrath of Sparta, each bringing its own faction traits, unit rosters, challenges and geographical starting point. In addition, famous generals and statesmen of history appear throughout the campaign, such as the Spartan general Lysander and the Athenian dignitary Sokrates.

In homage to their historical strengths, Sparta can field a greater variety of troops than other factions to reflect its mastery in land warfare, while Athens has the roster advantage in naval warfare.

Panhellenic Games and Festivals
The Greeks of the age were keen athletes, and the annual competitions of the Olympic, Pythian, Sithmian and Nemean games are represented. When each is held throughout the yearly calendar, you’ll have a number of choices to make. Do you sponsor an athlete, back a competitor, send an envoy or do nothing? Each choice can bring you favour or misfortune. Likewise, the Greek calendar was packed with religious festivals, which bring their own campaign bonuses and benefits, and bring the flavour of the age to life.

New Tech Trees
Wrath of Sparta features all-new tech trees, reflecting the military, naval and civic developments of the time. The six branches enable the player to advance in the fields of military, naval and support technologies, philosophy, aesthetics and mathematics.

Hellenic Tribalism
With the exception of the Persian Empire, the factions represented in Wrath of Sparta are Culturally Hellenic, so ‘Culture’ has been replaced with ‘Tribalism’. Each faction belongs to one of the Greek tribes, and while the four playable factions won’t suffer from public unrest due to the presence of other Greek tribes, they will suffer major diplomatic penalties with factions that were not ‘true’ Greeks.

The Persian Threat
The Empire of Persia sits at the eastern end of the campaign map and remains largely uninvolved with Greek affairs. However, if one Greek state rises to dominate all others, the Persians will escalate their military involvement over time, in a growing effort to bring that power to heel!

New Army and Naval Unit Rosters
New unit rosters are available to all four playable factions, representing warfare of this period in Greek history. The Greek factions feature a heavy emphasis on hoplites, with supporting elements to react to different combat scenarios and bring tactical variety. There are fewer but more specialised units of mercenaries available to swiftly bolster and bring greater flexibility to armies, and these are more widely available across the provinces.

The backbone of Greek naval assets is composed of tactical variations on the Dieres and Trieres hull types, with a greater focus on ramming and boarding. In addition, troop transports act more as cargo ships than combat vessels, and are no longer able to ram in naval battles, reducing the unfair advantage of troop convoys in naval warfare. This change will be retroactively applied to all ROME II campaigns.

Amongst over 50 new Naval and Land units for Wrath of Sparta, you will also encounter specialist and legendary troops, such as the Immortal Spearmen, Spartan Hoplites and Skiritai.

There is no denying that Total War: Rome 2 (which we will now refer to as Rome 2) had a pretty rough start in its life as a Total War game. Plagued by horrid load times, terrible battle AI and many other issues, it was a pretty lacklustre addition to the series. However since its launch in September 2013, the team at Creative Assembly has pulled out all the stops to make everything that was wrong, right. As such the Rome 2 we have in 2015 is quite the fantastic little nugget of RTS. Funny what an additional year of refinement can do…

The latest refinement brings us to the latest addition to the series of Grand Campaigns DLC’s, this time focused on the might of the Spartan Empire around the time of the Peloponnesian War, or for those of you whose ancient Greek history is a bit rough, the time when the Spartans gave the middle finger to the Athenians. Following on from the previous “Imperator Augustus” campaign which focused on the Roman Empire, “Wrath of Sparta” gives the much loved warrior nation a chance to kick some foreign dignitaries down a pit.

The first thing you will notice about the Wrath of Sparta campaign is the revised world map. No longer will you have the entire world to bring to heel, as in the vanilla Rome 2 campaign. Wrath of Sparta now focuses on the area around the greek islands and skirts the Persian empire, because what good is a game about the Spartans without the Persian empire being right dicks about things.

With the cut-down world map, the areas of land that were previously uninhabited now have new outlying towns, provincial capitals and of course a whole new set of factions to kick down wells. As well as the revised world map, the game also progresses a lot slower, with four turns for every season instead of the single turn. The additional turns have flow on effects on all things military and financial.

Waging war in winter will reduce your troops morale, army replenishment rate, as well as the amount of distance that they can cover to put your enemies to the sword. Much like the replenishment rate in winter, your factions income will take a dive in these winter months as the fields can’t be worked and the oceans are too rough to trade in. So much like the clever squirrel in those childhood stories, it pays to store your food and money for those cold harsh winter months.

So what do you do in those four months of reduced wealth and movement speed? Why you do what any good spartan does, you train armies of course! This brings us to one of the other changes in Wrath of Sparta, build queues. No longer will training units take only one turn, in fact the quickest you can train a unit in Wrath of Sparta is two turns. If you wish to train a strong unit, like a battalion of Royal Spartans, a whole four turns are required before they will be ready to set loose on your enemies in the spring time.

If you are looking for a large unit roster and you have selected the Spartans as your faction, bad news bear’s my friend as the Spartans have around 6 ground units to choose from – light and heavy spear troops, short and long range ranged units and light and heavy cavalry. There are some other units available like siege units, but the campaign win conditions seem to be met before I can ever research and unlock them. This of course takes longer than the diplomatic approach, where you make military alliances and braid each others back hair and dance about, but being that with nearly every second end turn some other faction was offering some sort of alliance, before you know it the victory conditions have been met and hey presto – you’ve won..

Another addition to the Wrath of Sparta campaign is the diplomatic penalties for sacking a provincial capital, cities like Sparta, Athens, Korinthos etc. Attack (and defeat) one of these locations and you will suffer a HUGE diplomatic penalty with all the other factions, even if they are your allies. This seems like a super weird addition to the series and feels like a forced step down the ‘diplomatic win’ path, where you wipe out all of the factions towns except their capital to then bully them into sort of alliance. I just dont get it, thankfully my AI companions also didn’t seem to either, so I simply let my military allies take the capitals and suffer the penalties.

Due to the semi-coastal setting of the campaign map, a lot of the battles are going to be fought on the same ‘small coastal town’ battle map. While probably accurate to the time period, it also gets pretty boring attacking time after time. It does however come in handy when you need to defend with an outnumbered force though, as you know where the AI commander is going to move his troops and where the map choke points are. Speaking of choke points, on one occasion I ‘lost’ a battle because even though I had killed all of the enemy’s land troops, three units of their navy had not disembarked from their ships. So while I heavily outnumbered the remaining army, was currently holding the town and had brutally murdered all of their land units, because there was still three naval units sipping their tea on their boats, I ‘lost’. This seems more an issue with the governing systems of Rome 2, than with the Wrath of Sparta DLC, but it was still terrible.

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So is the Wrath of Sparta DLC worth the price of admission? As always that is a tricky one to answer. If you love your Total War games and need something to tide you over until Total War: Attila launches, then yes, for $15 you get a new campaign world, a heap of new factions to play as and a chance to kick Persian dignita
ries down a pit. It’s not all good though, so if you are already frustrated with Rome 2, then Wrath of Sparta may feel like more of the same.

For the money though, I am thoroughly enjoying the Wrath of Sparta DLC, sure I would have liked an expanded unit roster, would have greatly appreciated some more battle maps and don’t understand the diplomatic penalties associated with sacking a faction capital, but despite all these things I still am having a lot of fun with it and the reason this review is so late is because I was enjoying playing it so much.

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Rating: 7.5/10