Help with Augustus campaign Roman army make up.

[hoom]

Well I actually didn't really recruit much after that post lol & didn't really get much chance to re-organise (mostly reduce elites).

I found myself far too busy with the long campaign to stamp out Lepidus while desperately avoiding the rest of my empire completely collapsing.

Here is the final state:




And how I got there (kinda long):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Following on from the Invasion shot above I retreated my depleted Gaul force South and Iceni captured a couple of my towns.
Fortunately once I rushed a stack up to support & my depleted armies recovered from their losses, Iceni decided to sue for peace.
With my forces needed elsewhere & only a couple of cities lost I readily agreed and for a long time that front stabilised.

Meanwhile I rolled Lepidus out of North Africa & Greece but I found myself suffering a -25 diplomacy penalty near finishing this which nearly caused complete collapse of my Empire.

Historically friendly trade partners one by one cut me off, this loss of revenue combined with a couple of food crises caused by uncareful economic expansion & surprisingly cunning exploitation of my thinly spread forces caused me twice to lose nearly all of Ethiopia & Egypt, more of Gaul, some of North Italy & bits of North Africa.

A few town losses is no biggie but with enough & breaking Province control in rich provinces like Africa & Egypt really hurt.
For a few turns my income was deeply in the red, had a food surplus & was losing towns on all fronts, really scary stuff.

Deeply frustratingly Numidia & Marcomani in particular would take one town then sue for peace next turn before I could get forces in range to win them back.

With my forces thinly spread & not wanting to be stuck at war with absolutely everyone I readily accepted their Peace even though it hurt my pride but planning vengeance later once I was done with Lepidus.

Eventually I finished off Lepidus in Spain which freed forces to hurry North just in time to defeat a more determined Marcomanni/Scordisci invasion.
Having retaken lost territory & started my momentum rolling against Marcomanni but with Egypt on the verge of collapse, Marcomanni sued for peace & I accepted.

I left a reasonable force behind in Gaul to stabilise that front but was able to spare some extra stacks to add to those I was already sending East to retake Ethiopia while also leaving a stack each in Spain, Carthage & Greece.

And of course, about the time that my forces were approaching the East, Parthia having finished taking Asia Minor took Crete off me & sent a lot of force over to Greece so that forced me to divert some there.
Fortunately I caught most of them with my main Navy = massive slaughter for minimal loss my side.

Meanwhile the reinforcements arrived in Egypt in time to fend off the major invasion by expanding Palmyra, retake the whole Egypt & Ethiopia.

Along the way I guess my scary big size started outweighing the diplomatic penalties & I had started to get some of my trade treaties back, Roxolani & another faction up at the top of the Black sea even offered military alliance which I accepted.

With Egypt secured it was time to start my invasion into the Levant with a naval invasion across the mouth of the Red Sea at the same time as taking Jerusalem in the North.
Well to my great surprise Palmyra up & offered to become my Client state even though they weren't militarily broken & still had most of their territory.
Not trusting it but in the interest of further reducing my enemies & planning to redirect to an Asia Minor invasion, I accepted.
(Their fairly light troops didn't really have a chance against my super-elite forces anyway as shown in Egypt & Ethiopia already...)

Which got me the last mission Success including all secondaries & a massive silver payout.

It also got me within cooee of Victory conditions so I used a bunch of that cash to encourage Iberia (who had long ago negotiated military access, taken over Northern Greece, Ilyria, Macedon & Thrace, and very importantly had maintained both trade and peace!) and Numidia to also become Client states.

And that got me the Victory.

Kinda cheap way to end it but I think its time to move on to a faction with more varied roster & I now have ability to field enough forces to attack on at least a couple of fronts while holding others so even in the event of Numidia & Iberia attacking at same time as fighting Palmyra & Persia, I'm confident in being able to at least hold in the East while clearing out the West -> sparing more force to steamroll the East so I don't think there would be much more of significant interest to do.

TLDR, I present you the very venerable & bacon loving Emperor Sextus Pompey Magnus:


And my final domestic Political situation:

Maybe because Medium difficulty but I had surprisingly little difficulty keeping the balance about the same region even without paying too much attention & never had a Civil war, as far as I can tell was never close to it either.

[Slaists]

Once your characters accumulate a ton of gravitas, influence turns very "sticky" (as in, it does not change much no matter what you do). I've got a feeling the gravitas cost of each senator gets inflated as the total gravitas pool grows. This is especially pronounced in IA since characters tend to live through the whole campaign.