Romans hard-coded to survive?

[ReluctantSamurai]

First off, what a brilliant idea to use peasants to blockade the other houses. I don't think I've ever heard of that before

But you must be playing something modded, yes? Because in vanilla RTW (patched to 1.5, of course) the SPQR cannot have any other province than Rome. Or at least I have never seen them capture another city....help other Roman factions defend theirs, but never to occupy.

In a similar vein, it seems to me (though I've never done any empirical testing) that any Roman faction still around for the Marian Reforms get some kind of financial boost to keep them going. I say this because I've had games where I've had every single Roman port blockaded, every one with no exceptions, and yet seen their coffers continuously rise on the financial page of the faction report. And in late game, port trading exceeds all other trade...combined. So where is all the money coming from?