So if you waste your units or lose a battle, it'll be difficult to recover from it if you're out of gold, which means that you must restart the battle. That's because there's only a finite amount of gold on each map, and gold determines everything. There's just not a lot of depth to the gameplay, as you can't really experiment with different units or tactics.
Both of these are interesting tweaks, but they don't radically change the otherwise familiar formula of gathering lots of resources, building lots of units, and swamping the enemy with them. You can give most units a primary and secondary weapon, as well as a shield, and the more powerful or effective that weapon or shield is, the more expensive that unit is to build. Another twist is that you design the units that you build, so instead of simply building barracks and ordering up a bunch of regular spearmen, you can create custom unit types depending on the weapons that you've researched to that point. For instance, you can order a galley to try to board an enemy vessel, at which point the soldiers that you crewed the ship with will battle the opposing crew for control of their ship. Ship combat is a lot more intricate than in most real-time strategy games, as you can determine the makeup of the crew, which affects the ship's performance in battle. To its credit, Sparta does try to introduce twists to the familiar RTS formula. To buy enough time to do these things, you can build defenses such as walls and traps, though the latter seem fairly useless as the artificial intelligence always seems to know the location of traps and destroys them with ranged weapons. This ensures that most missions in Sparta have a lengthy buildup phase as you sit around and wait to gather enough gold to research all the technologies you need and build and the advanced structures. The most limiting resource is gold, since it's the most valuable resource and generally you can harvest it only at a certain rate, no matter how many workers you have. You have workers who collect three basic resources-food, wood, and gold-which are used from everything to building construction to technology research. If you've played a real-time strategy game in the past 10 years, then you'll likely feel at home in Sparta very quickly. The Spartans, for example, mine gold, while the Egyptians sift it, though all the factions are roughly comparable to one another. Each faction has its own unique units, such as the Persian immortals, and a slightly different way of doing things. Now-famous figures from history make an appearance, such as the Spartan king, Leonidas. Meanwhile, the Egyptians try to throw off the yoke of Persian oppression. Basically, the aggressive Persians under Xerxes want to conquer the world, while the brave Spartans stand in their way. There are three campaigns in Sparta that let you play from the perspective of the Spartans, the Egyptians, or the Persians.
Ancient wars sparta maps movie#
Yes, the game features Spartans and a king named Leonidas, but Sparta: Ancient Wars has nothing to do with the famous recent movie about Sparta. Unfortunately, Sparta: Ancient Wars isn't up to the task, as it delivers a fairly standard real-time strategy experience that's indistinguishable from the rest of the genre.
However, the downside is that the over-the-top movie also raised expectations for anything Sparta-related to come after it, even a real-time strategy game that has absolutely no ties to the movie. Fortunately, thanks to 300, popular awareness of Sparta and its ancient warriors has never been higher. Sparta: Ancient Wars had the fortune and misfortune to come in the wake of the worldwide box office phenomenon known as 300.