Thanks for the thought, however:

If you suggest "balanced genghis", I may get around to trying it. I think it is one of the combinations that I did not try. I did try about ten of the possible combinations on carthage such as the classifications from the scipii, brutii, macedon, greek_cities, thrace, and some other classifications as suggested by various other threads (here and at TWC such as "craftsman smith") with very little variation in results per my original post. The only "carthage aggression" that I would see in some of the classifications was with 2-3 unit stacks doing an attack/retreat from similiar size roman stacks. The carthage AI would never commit an available large stack to an attack in any of the settings that I tried.

I did notice the the regions.txt file has "Italy" as a hidden resource for the "Alps to Sicily" regions that is not actually used for anything in the export_descr_buildings.txt file. I wondered if this might function as a flag to give roman AI factions an added advantage against AI non-roman factions in those regions and tried removing it but it seemed to have no effect.