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 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 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 or the Greeks 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 long 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 iduring the Civil War) and despite having a port (and later a shipwright and a dockyard) they have no naval power as they never create any fleets. Rome is also the only place were Legionary First Cohorts can be trained, giving S.P.Q.R. command of the strongest unit 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.

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