Romans hard-coded to survive?

[ReluctantSamurai]

The pass west of Mediolanum leading to Massilia had three full stacks of Julii pre-Marianite troops destined to relieve Massilia which was stymied by a single peasant sat in the pass picking his nose.

This is freakin' hilarious....I love it!

SPQR went to the aid of the Julii once they lost Arretium to Macedon. They ended up retaking that and then taking Segesta and Mediolanum which had also fallen.

When you say "they" you are referring to the SPQR? and if so, the boys in purple now have 3 more cities in addition to Rome?

The AI seems to massively favour Roman factions to the point of cheating.

That's a fact, in my book. In all the campaign's I've played (I play H/H, and sometimes VH/H), the only faction to ever siege a Roman city has been the Gauls. I once saw a situation where the Brutii took Thermon from the GC's and had a 3-star general and one Hastati unit in the city. The GC had a 3/4 stack of standard hoplites and the 5-star faction leader at the head well within striking distance. The boys in green had no reinforcements to send, so this family member and the lone infantry unit should have been dead meat. Does the AI retake the city? Nope. The stack spent 10yrs (yep, the whole 20 turns) walking back and forth between Thermon and Athens. Meanwhile, the faction leader died but still, a dozen or more exp.2 hoplites led by a captain should have made short work of a siege. Net result was that each turn, another infantry unit got added to the garrison until it filled to roughly a dozen or more, making Thermon virtually unassailable by the AI.

If that had been the original Shogun, the AI would have thrown everything but the Emperor's daughter [and maybe even her] at the city in an attempt to get it back.

And yet they're making units which somehow materialise outside of the peasant blockades and make their way over the Adriatic as if by magic.

So you're saying that units materialize out of thin air?

I've only seen this happen once. I was involved in a Scipii campaign and had reached the point of kicking the GC as well as Carthage off of Sicily. The AI had actually done a smart thing and sent a 15 unit reinforcement army by sea from Sparta to assist in breaking the siege of Syracuse. Too late, as it turned out, the city fell and I had a big bullseye on that fleet, chasing it all the way to North Africa. A second GC fleet had been tagging along nearby and the AI decides to land these troops near Carthage. There were 15 units (no general) on that fleet, and no troops on the other. When those troops disembarked, there was a full stack + general from the previously empty fleet, and the 15 units + general from the original one I had been chasing. Go figure

I had to laugh, though. Weren't the Carthaginians surprised