I don't know if you could use this as a game play guide as normally by this point, playing Rome, I would have expanded into Carthage, Hellen, Makedon and Epiros by now and have another 10-15 cities. I just wanted to see if I could wait the 30 years, for the Polybian reforms, before expanding beyond the four cities needed to start them.

Because I was going to wait I wanted to see if I could make some very powerful generals inbetween so I sent one west and one east and laid waste to rebel settlements and then sent a third, the 20yr old, west and began attacking more rebels and Arverni before bringing all back to Italy again. I ended up with one descent general, one very good general and one awesome general. The two previous ones are in their mid 40s so they will just stay put in their frontier cities now but my awesome general has now launched attacks against Carthage and has taken two more cities from them and is close to another Triumphus.

My goal was to quickly overrun Africa once the reforms took place but I faught two huge armies in Sicily which greatly reduced one legion and a second legion was destroyed when the ship carrying them to Africa was sunk.

I still have Sicily and Sardinia and have taken two cities in Africa but I now need to recruit more legions to recover from those two large losses.

I will start up EB and get the city names and post how I got him from green to a veteran in under 4 years.