I did do some cheating to help the AI expansion. Most of it was 'herding' the AI to go where I wanted them, sometimes it was downright cheating on grand scale, like when I conquered northern Iran with auto_win and gave it to Parthia to get them fighting with the Seleucids. And it worked.
Also, at the beginning, I teleported a merc army over to Marakanda and conquered it. (If you look at the progress pics in the first post, look closely and you'll see that Marakanda is Roman not Saka for most of the campaign.) I then used Marakanda to train HAs. The Baktrians constantly tried to retake Marakanda and were very weakened. Eventually Saka betrayed me and took Marakanda, then Baktra. Then Parthia betrayed Saka. I didn't think too poorly of that cheating though, since it didn't benefit my empire and the HAs actually drained tons of my money.
Oh, and see how Casse stagnated for a long time then exploded? That wasn't due to the death of the rebel super generals, I sent all of my leftover Iberian mercs to Britain and killed as many wandering rebels I could before the mercs all died off. Not really cheating, but 'herding'. I would also 'herd' the Aedui-Sweboz wars by sending armies to reinforce weak Sweboz possitions. Again, not cheating. but I pretended I wasn't doing it for role playing purposes.
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