Well as so many I've pre-ordered Rome, and played the hell out of it yesterday.

Aside from some bugs i found it quite an awesome experience, true the battles are won in about 5 minutes even when the double and triple speed doesn't work but i still love the land-sea battles.

HOWEVER

after playing for quite some hours as the Mighty Barcids two things started bugging me,

First, tax level is irrelevant since it always has to be on the lowest setting

Secondly, is there a point to the "senate", i mean so far i've just tried to recruit barcids but you don't see them make kids so what if your last barcid general dies?
DO you get a new one or not, i've adopted a young one so far, secured some promotions and that's about it. I keep taking regions and completing missions but my "influence" raises or lowers seemingly arbitrarily.
So my question is, is there something i'm not getting about this? I reckon you should try to use barcids in your expansion but since you recruit most of the generals at a high age (lowest was 19) of 30-40 and 1 year is 1 turn the skills of the armies are more important then the general and when an other dynasty has the best army i'm not just switching generals to get that right??

In any case, hoping for someone to offer me some insight into this OR someone who can verify the absolute irrelevancy of that whole process