I fired up a new campaign as nostalgic for some Rome action and this PC won't play the new game.
I picked the Scipii faction to play and thought I'd try and get rid of the rival Roman factions before the civil war. To do this I came up with the plan of capturing all of Sicily and then turtling, teching up those four cities and paying my excess profits to the sides the two rival factions were fighting. As an adjunct to that, I stood peasant units around Croton and Tarentum, bottling up the units inside from leaving, and standing peasant units in each pass out of northern Italy, blocking Julii expansion other than by sea.
This worked like a charm for a long while. The Brutii had managed to take Apollonia and Thermon before my peasant blockade kicked in and then they picked a fight with the Macedonians who I was funding. The Julii managed to snag Massilia and Narbo Martius before my peasant blockade cut off their reinforcements and the Spanish started to expand.
So the Spanish expanded in the west, taking out Gaul and Numidia and Carthage. Macedonia expanded in the east taking out Germania, Thrace, Greece and Dacia before expanding into Julii territory in North Italy. Both Empires have more than 20 provinces.
As soon as Macedonia attacked a Julii core territory, the Senate got involved, capturing three cities in quick succession. But, amazingly, despite the money I'm pouring into Macedon's war effort, they cannot beat either the Julii or the Brutii into extinction. They can get them down to two cities, but each time they bounce back. The AI seems to conjure units for them out of thin air and teleport them over the Adriatic to attack Macedonian cities there when previously they couldn't get out of their cities I was blockading.
Is the game hardcoded to keep them alive for a civil war event?
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