As with all Total War games, you can fight them instantly in a strategic-level battle on the campaign map, or you can choose to zoom in on the battlefield and fight in real time with your companies of soldiers on a 3D landscape. Rebels are threatening one of them so you have to take them out first. You start out with just four cities including Sparta under your control. I played as Menelaus of the Greeks, the king whose wife Helen was wooed away by Paris of Troy.