Need Help Starting at Later Date

Today I got a copy of The Twelve Caesars. First up was Julius, so naturally after a bit of reading I fire up R:TW and start a new campaign as the Julii.

I've begun to truly detest the early game (the strategy aspect is great, but the armies the AI fields are pathetic.) I decide I would just edit descr_strat to give my faction 15,000 denarii and just click End Turn all the way up to the 220's to see if I could a) trigger the Marian Reforms and b) fight some decent Barbarian armies at that point.

This idea didn't really work. I had the AI controlling my faction (the 'manage everything' tab clicked) and I was swamped by the Gauls. The computer would only recruit town watch, dogs and hastati. This really puzzled me since I have modded the game so that peasants, dogs, town watch, and other 'militia level' units take 3 turns to train and all the superior units take 0 turns (from frogbeast's ideas). If this is the sort of managing the AI is doing for everyone else, I'd rather someone 3 genes from being a monkey call the shots.

Anyway, my main question is, are there any changes I can make so that I can start my campaign at a later date? Is it possible just to change the starting date in descr strat? I may just end up editting the file so that every faction's capitol has the highest available barracks, stables, scriptorium, etc.

I really want to play with the Post MR units but since 1.2 it seems to take a month of sundays for this to occur.

Ok, I'm not sure whether this is what you're asking, but in \Data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_strat.txt you can edit the start and the end date. The lines are just below the first ones where you edit to play all factions. The rest of the buildings you would have to edit manually, of course, further down in the file for each region. Just follow the way the code is implemented, with { and } and building descriptions as per export_descr_buildings.