Rome Senate bug

Well, maybe not so much a bug... but..

So I'm playing Carthage and after a long campaign in Iberia (uppity Spaniards don't know when to quit), I had a full stack that I no longer needed. Rather than do the generous thing and disbanding them so they can tend to their crops, I decided to give them a glorious death at the walls of Rome. Afterall, the senate had 2 full stacks of pumped up troops, along with a garrison that includes fully upgraded urban and praetorian cohorts. I figure, what chance does my one stack of crappy Libyan Spearmen and Spanish Scutarii Mercs have?

Well, either I'm too damn good or the AI is just too prone to flanks (I'll take the latter for $500, Alex)... I wipe out the 2 stacks plus the Rome garrison, including all 3 family members in the battle.

So now the Senate has no faction leaders, no units and Rome lies defenceless at my feet. I wonder about that so I don't take Rome and just progress the turns.

The senate faction did not die. It did not build any new units (after 12+ turns), Rome was still empty, but its navy was still operational (and attacking my fleets). After I wiped out the remnants of the Senate Navy, the Senate faction was for all intents and purposes dead, except it wasn't.

So my main question is, why does the senate have family members? Or, if they must have family members, why doesn't the faction die when all of its family members are dead (or take a page from MTW with the pope, where a new pope is sprung from the grave... I mean the Roman senate should just elect a new uh, "representative"? Or, if all of its faction members are dead but the faction won't die as a reuslt, why doesn't it build any new troops to garrison Rome, etc? It's certainly not a lack of money, as the Senate faction has well over 250k denarii.

I ended up reloading the game and disbanding my throw away army in one of my cities. So my men got to harvest to their crops afterall.

The Senate doesn't seem to follow the same rules as the others. They could not possibly afford to maintain all those troops that have from a single city, for one. They seem to just have new family members pop into existance for another. So, I don't really find it suprising that they would hang around with no family members. It's probably coded into the game that the Senate faction is eliminated when Rome is lost. I know in my last game, I caught Rome with the massive Senate army elsewhere in Italia (had been chasing a bandit army all the way down into Bruti territory near Tarentum), and when I captured Rome, the entire army vanished. It didn't turn rebel, it just disbanded completely.