Heh, I love the Spartans, but my favorite is actually gearing the Spartans towards Nature.
The game is all in how you build your social and military designs (Cybernetic Society for the win!)
The grav-ships are bloody awesome (also there's no auto-designs for them, get used to designing your own ships)
Two pointers, one, when making an amphibious terraformer, it will only operate on the type of tile it's currently on when auto-terraforming, so you need to manually move it to the water when you're finished with land or vise versa.
Second, do not underestimate paratroopers or airdrop units of any kind, once you get the orbital space station you can do insertions ANYWHERE making the acquisition of cities quite easy having a battery of paratroopers standing by and waiting for the army to clear the streets.
Yes Hunter-Seeker is awesome, and normally a planet-busting offense to me if I don't get it and I am unable to reach it, however you can still win without it. Miriam's got some nasty anti-saboteur strength through theology/loyalty.
Make sure you go for an oceanic city as soon as possible, giving you a foothold into the water to launch attack craft from (and defend from those nasty bombarding ships due to AI deciding that it can take the city.)
Go for pods, go absolutely ape for the pods, have at least two scouts (Ships AND buggies) on each terrain type if not more scouring the planet, those things will give you one hell of an edge if you collect enough of them at the start.
Avoid PSI if you aren't designing your social structure to be high morale, it looks shiny and can be deadly, but in the end it's laughable because it's easily trounced by the next tier of tech. (Natural units like mind worms and Isles are an exception to this rule as they operate mostly on their own morale rather than society morale.)
Avoid nerve stapling unless it's a time of crisis for the city (you're under attack and you could either buy the ship to save the city from the enemy & nerve staple the people, or buy that holo-theater to placate the people but have the city taken in the next turn.)
Santiago will not steer you wrong in my opinion, however it's all up to how you want to play them. I tend to build my Society around Nature strangely enough and it works out quite well for them in the end due to the growth bonuses provided.
As for crossfire, I dunno, it's neat, but honestly the overtures for the game didn't seem to fit as well as the original game (what with the original story being the cabinet members from your civilization game being leaders of each faction because of the unity fracturing.)
