Senate (RTW Faction)

Senate General's Bodyguard.

Overview

The Senate faction (also known as SPQR) is an unplayable faction in the vanilla Rome: Total War game.

The Senate faction is relatively immobile and acts as guardian of the Rome region, they have comparatively strong units and provide a good defence for Rome in the early stages of the game.

When the Senate faction is present in the game the other Roman factions will receive senate missions, have senate standing ratings and senate offices.

History

The S.P.Q.R. faction acts as protector of Latium, the region where Rome is situated and as lord of the other 3 Roman factions, giving them missions and influencing them in several ways: the missions itself and the result of these missions, completion will earn you the Senate's gratitude and nice rewards in the form of games, Senate offices (making the Roman faction more powerful) or denarii. However, if missions are not completed the particular Roman faction will become hated by S.P.Q.R. and in extreme cases war may be declared on the Roman faction not completing the missions.

S.P.Q.R. are mostly among the richest factions in the game despite controlling only one region and Rome's riches are mostly in minus. Also, Rome's public order is generally low when under S.P.Q.R. lordship, always between 45 % and 95 % to 100% in rare cases. S.P.Q.R. control some of the strongest units in the game combined with good generals and leaders creating an impenetrable defence for Rome in the early stages of the game. They are soon surpassed in military power by the other factions but because of the strong alliance with the other Roman factions, they are almost never under threat from other factions. Enemies may send small armies by fleet but they are always destroyed. The only enemies that enter Latium by land are the Rebels and in extreme cases, either the barbarians,the Greeks or Macedon destroy the Julii and become neighbours with the Senate.

If S.P.Q.R. gets destroyed, it is generally by a Roman faction when the Civil War starts. Mostly The Senate stand their ground for some time and it requires certain skill to wipe them from the map in one move.

Generally S.P.Q.R. only fights when an enemy army enters Latium (also during the Civil War) and despite having a port (and later a shipwright and a dockyard) they have no naval power as they mostly don't bother about building a strong fleet. Rome is the only place were Legionary First Cohorts can be trained, giving S.P.Q.R. command of one of the strongest infantry units in the game as said earlier. Their generals are also more than decent, for example Marcus Maxentius who mostly becomes an eight to nine star general.

They do use diplomats but mostly only have one, being Flavius Nepos in the early game. Assassins never seem to be used by S.P.Q.R. ( only seldom they use assassins in the Civil War) and spies are also not common.

EARLY-WAR GUIDE:

Although there are not many who are eager to play as the Senate, they sure are a challenging, rewarding faction to play. The player starts in control of Rome, very cunning generals and a huge army. The first thing to do is to get rid of the Roman families. One 'tactic' may be to act like the Senate under AI control: simply wait, see and try to guide the wars while building up Rome and making it into an impenetrable fortress. You will have to use the 'add_money' cheat for income as Rome alone cannot pay for a great host, generals and construction works. Therefore you will have to add about 5000 denarii by means of a cheat every turn. Experience learns that this tactic might be effectful indeed as sometimes the Roman families need a bit of time to muster a host to attack you since they have been busy fighting their respective enemies. When the Gladiator Uprising appears it is all of a sudden much easier to take over all the Roman families' cities.

The most likely tactic will be to get rid of the Roman families early on and to secure the italian peninsula. Controlling the Roman heartland will give you a good income indeed, allowing you to build your might slowly and simply wait and see. The following tactic is very effective to secure the italian peninsula:

S.P.Q.R.'s great advantage is their enormous army, ready for war straight away. This is at the same time also a disadvantage since this great army is very expensive and will make you bankrupt easily. It is important to move swiftly.

While it may seem pure logic to an unexperienced player to invade Capua rightway, driving the Scipii away, a more 'general-like' player will see that the best thing to do is to split the army and invade Tarentum and Arretium. By the time your army attacks, the Brutii will certainly have captured Appolonia. The same goes for the Julii and Segesta. So, assailing Arretium and Appolonia will give you great military advantages: 1. You have split the Brutii-forces in two, with a sea as barrier on the right. 2. You split the Julii-army in two by capturing Arretium. 3. You now have the opportunity to assail the Scipii from two sides.

Further moves vary a bit as the families will react differently everytime. Mostly the Julii will gather their remaining units and try to recapture Arretium. Meet them head-on and block the way with a fort. Fight the battle (very likely to become a 'famous battle' on the campaign map) before the gates of the fort and the Julii are wiped out for good. Take Ariminum and then Segesta. Meanwhile you must have rebuilt your strength in the south to assail Croton. Tarentum has stables so train equites and attack Croton. The Brutii are now left with only Appolonia which will still take very long to evolve to a real city and it won't be long before the Greeks are literally knocking on their door.

Move to Capua and either draw out the Scipii army or lay siege to it. Now the Scipii are the biggest problem afterwards. Either move on to Sicily or you can build two big fleets in your ports and lock the Scipii up on Scily with the Carthaginians (the Scipii will have taken Syracuse already).

After the war is over you can regroup and take Mediolanium and Patavium, uniting the italian peninsula under the banner of S.P.Q.R.! From here, make a ceasefire with the Gauls, even though they will break it by attacking your ports. Now build up your settlements slowly. Raise armies and then set out to conquer Europe! S.P.Q.R. is coming!

Modding the Senate

The internal name of the Senate faction is romans_senate The strong alliance between the Senate and the other Roman factions exists because of the superfaction romans_senate line in the other Roman factions sections of the descr_strat.txt file.

If that line is removed the alliance becomes a normal one that can be broken by any of the parties at any time. However that does not remove all the hard-coded attributes associated with the Senate faction. If you wish to play the Senate as a normal faction or mod them to represent another faction in RTW v1.5 you should change their internal name to something else. This has to be done in all the files the romans_senate name appear in. The apparent name can be left the same so instead of

 {ROMANS_SENATE}					S.P.Q.R.

in expanded_bi.txt you have:

 {NEW_NAME}					S.P.Q.R.

A set of files changing the internal name of the senate faction is available here.

See Also

• Factions in RTW

External Links

RTW Factions
Armenia | Britannia | Carthage | Dacia | Egypt | Gaul | Germania | Greek Cities | The House of Brutii | The House of Julii | The House of Scipii | Macedon | Numidia | Parthia | Pontus | Scythia | Seleucid Empire | Senate | Spain | Thrace | Rebels