Spartans

The War Nerd had a good take on them: https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-319163.html

>>34400764
They had a good strategy for the time (phalanx) and the romans made it better. But artillery made it useless.

>>34400764
They were great for their time, but you have to consider that spartans actually trained and practiced their entire lives, while keeping slave populations to do things like agricultural work.

Comparable greek states like Athens only had town militias that were raised in times of war.

The phalanx formation that they fought in also relied heavily on unit cohesion; a ragtag group of citizens obviously got outclassed by a group of men who trained and lived as a unit.

Now fuck off back to >>>/his/ where this belongs.

>>34400794
All the greeks used the phalanx, it was not a spartan invention. And the romans never used the phalanx or anything even remotely similar, they had their own brand of combat which was maniple based.

>>34400845
I was oversimplifying.

>>34400855
You were plain wrong; artillery didn't make the phalanx useless either. It went out of fashion because it was to immobile and easily broke in uneven terrain or against an agile enemy (ie romans)

>>34400867
It certainly didn't help.

Excellent warriors, yes. But they were harsh, cruel, and too hard on themselves. They created a rigid society capable of producing only warriors, and although they achieved military dominance for a time, they utterly failed to adapt to the changing world, and were defeated by Thebes and eventually conquered by the Romans.

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>>34401107
>too hard on themselves

>>34400827
Also keep in mind the strategic limitations of their life style. They wouldn't be able to go on ling campaigns because they treated their slaves really shitty and we're constantly afraid of revolts, and would have their army return constantly because of that.

>>34400764
>TLDR: Mostly the former but they couldn't do much with it.

On a tactical level they were definitely hot shit when compared to the other city states. They had a standing army that was fully funded by the state while the other city states relied on volunteer militias and conscription when shit got really bad. On the battlefield the Spartans had phalanxes of professional soldiers trained from a young age and covered in head to toe with bronze armor. Their opponents meanwhile were typically average citizens who just had some rudimentary training and the equipment that was mostly dependent on how much each soldier was willing to pony up for. That made the prospect of dealing with the Spartans really fucking scary for anyone on their shitlist.

The problem was that Sparta's big, badass army came at a cost that limited them on the strategic level. All that money they spent on making sure their phalanxes were the absolute best was money that they couldn't spend on infrastructure and trade. Insisting on making every able-bodied man possible a soldier meant that their economy relied on large slave labor that they were always worried about potentially rebelling. As a result Sparta was a sleepy, agrarian backwater that couldn't use much of its military power beyond its borders. That was fine if they were dealing with individual city states or had plenty of allies to back them up, but whenever they went up against a legit empire they were in deep shit. They began the Peloponnesian War losing to the Athenian empire and eventually won only because Athens got overwhelmed by enemies and rebellions. When they went up against Thebes, Macedon, Epyrus, and finally Rome, they were all on their lonesome and got buttfucked harder than their neophytes during "special training" with their appointed older mentors.