Tired of seeing the Roman's dominate the board in single player I decided to see what would happen if the Roman's were total push overs. I modified their settlements to have 1200 population, town level, no military buildings, and left their generals without any troops to command. So they start out in 270 as the four weakest factions in the game by far and have no hope of coming out of this until they are at least able to hit large town level which would take them quite a few turns.

To my surprise by 255 when my Seleucid army crossed into Greek lands I saw the Brutii were in Appolonia and had another army in Northern Greece. I had thought that they would have been the faction most likely to survive because of their location in Italy so I still assumed the Julii and Scipii were at least finished. However, I instead found that the Julii had taken the two Gaul settlements to the North and the Scipii were in control of Sicily.

To see how this could have happened I restarted the game and removed fog of war. It turns out that no settlement near one of the Roman's would build a large enough army to try and compete with the weakened Roman position. In fact they would just sit around and wait for the Roman's to attack almost 10 years into the game and then would suffer a defeat to a pathetic thrown together army.

So I've come to the conclusion that the game is obviously made for the Roman's to win if the player doesn't defeat them.

Out of curiosity though, has anyone ever seen one of the Roman factions fall to another AI faction?