Problems with Huge scale and population for barbarians?

[HIGGUM]

I re-installed Rome because empire BAI was awful and I prefer the Roman time frame to the medieval one. I re-installed darthmod for the way better gameplay when compared with other mods.

But there was one small problem - I love the huge scale, however, this resulted in barbarians emptying out their settlements too early to create their armies. So when I invade Gaul around 230 BC as Julii, each settlement (apart from Alesia) has around 400 people in. This is a bit stupid, but it also makes me realise why it was so easy to steamroll the Gauls after a certain amount of time - they had no mans in their settlements to recruit. It was the same story with germans, dacians, and spanish.

I took the time to edit the descr_strat file. I increased the population of almost every settlement on the map, gave each barbarian faction a city, and each "civilized" faction 2 cities. To make things more interesting - each faction can now recruit an elite unit e.g. chosen swordsmen for gaul, trarii for romans, cataphracts for parthia etc. I had to edit the civilized factions, because when I tested it out, the barbarians were too over-powered if I increased their pop-cap alone, and they had too many armies too soon (their units are significantly cheaper).

I believe I have now found a very good balance. Playing as the Julii at 237 BC so far, fought a bunch of battles with gallic full stacks, pushed them out of northern Italy. When I check their settlements with spies, they have 1500-2000 guys in the smaller settlements, and have an extra city or 2. Same story with germans. The brutii are fighting macedon, seem to be winning slowly, but it's not the usual steamroll. Though that might be due to the fact the greeks have not backstabbed them! The scipii and spain have finished off carthage, and parthia has been wiped out, though they seemed to last a bit longer.

If anyone out there stills plays this mod, and wants a better balance like I did, feel free to download my descr_strat file. save it to : Rome Total War/data/world/maps/campaign/imperial_campaign.

Remember to backup the original incase you don't like what I've done! Any questions feel free to ask.

Oh and this is a problem with vanilla rome not darthmod. You'd think they'd of scaled the population up to deal with huge scale.