why are most factions poor?

[themilo]

I’m going to try out Rome since my biggest issue with vanilla Rome is that playing as Rome is very easy, please tell me that the marius reform automatically upgrades all of my units so that I don’t have to manually replace all of my troops.

I tried out some other factions and I’m surprised how many factions start out with negative income and surrounded by enemies, maybe this mod just isn’t for since I like challenging games not frustrating games.