I am not talking about morals, but roughly perceived power.
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The Hegemony and Halassur are both “jailer of nations” type of empires and even after hundreds of years of the Hegemony making incremental gains by way of absolutely horrific warfare with more of the most horrific parts of it perpetrated by the Thaumaturchy Halassur is still larger if slightly less magically advanced but if I were to guess the power balance is roughly even at the moment and both societies seem to be facing pressure internally but the Hegemony’s pressures seem to be far more acute because its society is built on an unsustainable foundation and no reform will save it at this point, sorry not sorry prince nippletwister, where Halassur does not seem to have crossed that point of no return just quite yet. For what it is worth Halassur also seems to have naval superiority and probably diplomatic superiority when it comes to rest of the world, such as it is, due to the Hegemony’s relative isolationism.
I also get the impression that even in the gameworld the power balance is perceived as roughly even at the moment in spite of the Hegemony’s best efforts.
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truly Spartans where most wile of people and athens one of most righteous and were truly horrified buy brutality of helots and spartan’s I’m sure that is reason why in 464bc when helot revolt happened they bravely sent troops.
To help spartans against helots 
on more serious note there is no any evidence what really life was for helots. there are some small passages that sometimes contradict each other and most likely are written by spartas enemy or century’s later after events happened and they can’t be taken as reliable sources. one thing is still certain being helot is Sparta was most likely as bad as being slave in Athens.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vvsx27/the_spartan_brutality_towards_the_helots_is/
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i.e. the history of pretty much everything before the printing press, and most of it afterward. 
If you reduce that in summary to “no evidence,” you’re dissolving the past in a sea of agnosticism.
We do have evidence for what life was like for helots, just not in all-argument-ending quantity or quality. While it’s possible (as with the sources you’ve cited) to deprecate some sources of evidence in a way that emphasizes Sparta’s continuities with other Hellenistic slave systems, that’s not the only option that contemporary academics find plausible.
Athens was anything but “righteous” – just ask the Meilans, let alone their own slaves – and there’s a long Western history of whitewashing Periclean Athens in particular, but our rejection of that simplification doesn’t have to go as far as “Sparta wasn’t that bad actually.”
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I always took it as “wow, even other Ancient Greek aristocrats are sometimes uncomfortable with how the Spartans treat their slaves, they really had to work at it to get there”
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Some of the best sources on “Greek” behavior was recorded by Scythians – trade and “official” contacts revealing how “Greeks” acted and then being recorded by their hosts with a different perspective that held different values… interesting stuff if you ever want/need to research it.
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i am not arguing that Spartans where angels. of course they where monsters by todays standards as well whole Greece should be. im just arguing that while they most likely never were true heroes like they are depicted in some movies they also most likely weren’t total monster’s which is also one interpretation we get about them. and even if they were we really don’t have any credible information about that.
Plutarch should not be and is not good source what helots life in ancient sparta was he at best is writing few century’s after events happened and got education in athens and his writhing are more ethically motivated rather then accuracy so for him of course Spartan’s where terrible people they were enemy of Athens.
im sure it should be very easy to understand why Isocrates writting are also very bad source about sparta as he was athenian and lost many thing with war against sparta.
Thucydides is also great source about sparta im sure he is also impartial and his writhing about spartan’s killing there helots who took part in there war and where promised freedom was not politically motivated. especially after his account about Melos. where our glorious Athens deiced to kill all man and sold children and woman to slavery.
i read most of above article and i find that evidence from which conclusions are made is of same level vigor as idea that Montezuma declared Cortes as hes lord and god. and if cortezes writhing’s cant be considered good source about what really Aztec civilization was like i also think that above people are no better sources .
fact is sparta lost not only militarily but they lost culturally as well. and in first century bc from were we get most of writhings about there brutality and kripteia was written in world who was culturally dominated by athens and hes successor states.
like rome is not good source about about cartage or Spanish about Aztecs i don’t think Athenian descendants should be considered better source about Sparta.
i will repeat im not arguing that sparta was good place im jus saying that even IF (about which we dont have sufficient evidence to say with any certainty ) sparta was mcuh more terrible place compared to other greek city states contemporary Greek did not consider it as moraly much worse then them and in most casses where no way better then spartans.
point is Athens vs Sparta certainly was not good vs evil fight
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It should be noted that a lot of the writers about Sparta were notorious Laconophiles. Stuff like throwing children off the rocks was recorded because the writers thought it was awesome.
And yes, by our standards Athens vs. Sparta was very much evil versus evil. Spartan helotry was still one of the most savage forms of slavery in history.
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Reminds of those poles who want to balkanize russia. Don’t it probably would make life in hellasur worse.
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A lot of the aristocratic Athenians resented the democracy too. Not that the demos was large, but it was a much bigger oligarchy than they wanted. Sparta is used as a bludgeon in Athenian internal politics.
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I definitely agree that Athens and Sparta wasn’t a good v evil fight. Ramidel just ninja’d me to the point that our ancient sources are mostly pro-Sparta, colored by nostalgia rather than disparagement of the Spartan past; Plutarch and Xenophon in particular were unbashed aristocrats who seem to have a broadly positive spin on most the things we look at today and say “brutal and awful.” They certainly don’t seem to have been writing with an agenda of “Sparta was terrible.”
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Sure, but the Spaniards didn’t make everything they said up. Human sacrifice was very extensive for instance. The Aztecs were clearly doing a lot of things to make the nations around them hate them or Cortes would never have had enough men to defeat them.
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They didn’t, but a lot of it was.
There’s this common perception among contemporaries that because the Aztecs were ruthless or abusive hegemons, that gives credence to the takeover by Spain, which it very much didn’t, even by the standards of the time.
By the time the Spanish and the Aztecs came to blows, human sacrifice wasn’t actually that widespread. Great Britain was executing more people by hanging than the Aztecs sacrificed.
It was a bad religious practice, but it wasn’t a spilling of blood beyond the pale or some massive atrocity that the Western European powers couldn’t fathom.
The Spanish vs Aztec conflict wasn’t a ‘lesser evil vs big evil hoisted by its own petard’, it was a clash between a large and abusive state versus an even larger and more abusive state in the process of commiting ethnic cleansing in the mainland and outright genocide in their ‘liberated’ colonies.
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What it was was an illegal mission by a renegade from the bigger and more abusive state, allying with conquered peoples who were under the smaller abusive state’s boot and needed help getting out, not realizing that they were trading one yoke for another.
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Hard to make life in Russia worse. Tho I as Pole do not believe in viability of such balkanisation
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Yeah, I’ve never understood justifying bad behavior of one party based on that of others. To me this is kind of the same idea to people picking a “hero” of the Nazi-Soviet war. You won’t ever find me saying the Spaniards were better. If I ever say “Moctezuma II was kind of a bastard” I’m not saying “Cortes wasn’t that bad actually”. On the contrary, Cortes strikes me as one of the most evil people I’ve ever read about.
I will say that Long-run, I think it would have been better for the Spanish to lose that particular conflict similar to how it was better that the Nazis lost.
And if you wanted to say that people don’t know how nightmarishly bad the Spaniards were as a general rule, I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that either.
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Hence why I’m cosmo.
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Would a regionalist domain that spreads across the borders of shayard and wienrj be more of a cosmo or homelander ideology? I’d guess it depends on how you define the “home” part of homelander, do border areas have any cultural mixing we could use to make a new hybrid?
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The territory ruled doesn’t define whether a state is homelander or cosmopolitan, it’s the state’s attitude toward that territory.
It’s entirely possible for a Shayardene homelander state to rule over the entire territory of the Hegemony. The question then becomes “what does it mean for a Shayard homelander state to be governing non-Shayardene lands?” And the answer is that it’s likely to look as colonial as the current Hegemony, just with Shayard governing over the land in place of Karagon and non-Shayardene nobles restricted to regional authority and vassalage. A cosmopolitan Hegemony, by contrast, would actively integrate the other peoples into the ruling class at all levels.
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Sparta won the Second Peloponnesian War so not sure what fortune there is to be had at Athenian battle prowess. In terms of winning posterity, I think that probably had more to do with Spartan nobles being famously men of few words while their Athenian counterparts had an opinion on everything and made sure everyone knew what it was…
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