What I was trying to explain is that if Slave faction worked like any other faction it would already have the ability to build buildings and recruit units including spies etc that were available to the Roman culture, so adding a separate recruitment lines in EDB for { slave,} is unlikely to make any difference.

Don't know about them recruiting diplomats as I always mod diplomats out of game - cos bribing is too annoying. But I'm sure I've never seen a rebel spy.

There is obviously some stuff hardcoded about slave faction as it effectively shadows all others factions, taking over cities when they rebel, and also does not have a faction leader etc, etc. I was thinking that the AI behaviour of the Slave faction is probably hard coded so it doesn't have the inclination to recruit spies etc.

Hmmm. Have just had a go making them playable and when played by human player they can build buildings and recruit soldiers and spies. If the city is occupied by a slave army thats placed in it in descr_strat the type of units recruited are those of that armies sub_faction 'faction', random rebels still seem to generate outside of cities and the units in those are related to the rebel faction for the region in descr_regions.