Triggering Marian reforms without Rome

I forget which thread I saw it in, but I saw it mentioned that if a Barbarian faction takes Rome, the Marian reforms will not occur if its not already a huge city (the vanilla Marians not EB scripted etc etc etc)

MAA mentioned that a solution to this would be to set another city to act as an Italian province and build a huge city.....

But could not an integrated solution be built into EB 1.1? If it could work, might I suggest that the city in the Eremos/Sahara/Arabian desert region be made a huge city with the Italy_province_resource thing? Thus allowing reforms reliant on vanilla Marian reforms to be triggered without relying on the AI holding Rome/turning it into a huge city

We tried that and the AI doesn't seem to want to build the Imperial Palace there.

I thought it was any city in Italy APART from Rome?

Actually, it is only four cities: Ariminum, Arretium, Arpi, and Capua.

I just give Capua a little population boost when I feel it's time...

I'm currently thinking of giving Arretium to some random faction, say, Baktria, and boosting the population,when it reaches 198BC...