Fixing An Empire ERE

I'm about 40 turns in to my ERE campaign on Hard.

Battle-wise I'm holding my own, but campaign-wise I'm struggling.

Pontus and Macedonia have both successfully rebelled and control 2 regions each. I'm at war with Sassanids and all their troll states. I managed to make peace with Huns, however, I'm not able to make peace with much else.

I lost Alexandria and North Africa. I'm beginning to lose the Palestine area now as well.

And because I've lost a few regions or am dealing with sieges Faction is trapped in famine.

Do I just start over? I restarted once already, but the campaign for ERE just seems overwhelming. When do you finally say it's hopeless?

How did you do it?

Well, one of the approaches to playing as ERE is to accumulate investment capital and live off of interest (5% per turn). Playing like that, you can survive even just by keeping a few islands in the Mediterranean and launching a counter-attack from there.

Also, a lot depends on the starting traits of Sassanids and ERE's puppet rulers. If they roll reasonable, ERE can be easy even on legendary difficulty. If those rulers roll as ERE haters, unreliable, etc., prepare for hell starting from turn 2...

I personally, played ERE by stabilizing food, happiness, sanitation initially and just holding off my enemies until the econ stabilized. I earned a lot of cash from joining all WRE's wars which eventually raised their opinion of me so high that they volunteered to become my puppets netting me around 12-15K extra income/turn. From that point, the campaign became very easy.