How is the structure of Republican Rome going to be handled?

[WhatAnArtist]

I mostly mean in terms of the family tree and politics features. With every faction in the base Attila game there is always one leader who is King or Emperor or what-have-you, and he can basically do whatever he wants in regards to deciding what the other members of his family and court do, and he remains in his position until he dies. But how is this going to be handled with the Roman faction, since at the start of the game they're at the peak of the Republic, and the Roman Republican system had two consuls that were elected to rule the Republic for a year, and then they'd step down and go back to being regular senators, and so this would continue until Julius Caesar, a hundred and fifty years later.

So is some sort of election system going to be implemented to decide who becomes consul? And if so how long will they remain consul? I mean if the mod starts out with 4 TPY, that means they're consul for only four turns before someone else is. This would probably work better with a 12 TPY mod, although with only 4 TPY it would make each of their rules feel very short.

[Petellius]

Fortunately, alongside the family tree there is a system for offices. We'll be changing these to the correct offices in the Republic. We're looking into making these offices kick the guy out every year, and you can set requirements too, such as age, prestige and previous offices.

As such we can accurately portray the senatorial system. As for the "king" I'm not entirely sure what we'd discussed, it's been a while since we've talked about it, either a proconsul or just the head of the family.

[ViktorGiJoe]

Will we be able to form the Roman Empire or will it always stay as a Republic?

[The Wandering Storyteller]

You will be able to form an Empire in AE.

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[ABH2]

Ok. To sum things up in what I'd call the official official response - what we release the first time around won't have anything or much changed from Rome II besides offices. The basic mechanic of the faction leader for Rome will be that of an Emperor, though right now it has been renamed to patriarch (head of your family). There have been various things discussed internally, though there's nothing concrete at the moment.

We definitely hope to do some things with politics via the DB and scripting in the future. At the forefront of all that would be a sensible transition in the GC between a Republic and Empire for Rome (though I'd imagine/hope it could be something we could use for other factions, as well). I don't want to go promising things that we aren't sure on ourselves.

And I don't post much, but I did just want to ensure people the mod is still very much active. Our team coordinates just about daily online and several of us mod daily.

[Haddon]

An idea, though probably a lot of work, would be to make a separate "empire" faction for the barbarians, kinda like the Ostrogoths in ATW vs the Ostrogoths in The Last Roman campaign. There are mods out there that transform factions (namely the Franks and Saxons) into Romano-Germans after you reach a certain point, so it is certainly doable. Just, like I said, a lot of work. It might be easier to do this than work in political scripting. For the Romans it wouldn't really work, because the difference between Republican Rome and Imperial Rome is so significant, but the difference between the Frankish Kingdoms and the HRE (at least early on) are much smaller.

[Reznikov]

Why a proconsul? Weren't proconsuls just ex-consuls from previous years that gain governorship of just a province?

[Republican]

Will there be a mechanic for us to initiate Civil War against other families? In other words, could we follow the footsteps of Caesar and march on Rome?

[Haddon]

I could see civil war between political parties, just like Caesar against the Optimates. Or Marius against the...proto-Optimates, we will call them. But between families doesn't make a whole lot of sense, IMO. It's not like Caesar declared war against the Cornelii or Brutii. I guess he kinda went to war with the Pompeii.

[WhatAnArtist]

It's not like Caesar declared war against the Cornelii or Brutii. I guess he kinda went to war with the Pompeii.

He went to war with Rome itself. It's just that Pompeii was the only person the Senate thought could stop Caesar.

[Haddon]

He went to war with Rome itself. It's just that Pompeii was the only person the Senate thought could stop Caesar.

He went to war with the Optimates, the political "party" in control of the Senate at the time. Pompeii was their choice because he had his own veteran legions, both in Spain and in the East. They figured they could go over to Greece, use the forces in the east to hold off Caesar while they gathered up Pompeii's veterans and levy new legions from Africa and Anatolia. But Caesar beat Pompeii's Spanish veterans, then marched to Pharsalus and kicked their asses.

[CommanderBC]

Is it possible to set the "Patriarch" manually when you start the game through an event or something similar? A great representation of the Roman family politics is what would make this mod topple Rome 2. Attila has so much more potencial to be a better representation of the ancient world.

[isa0005]

Its just a shame we can have multiple family trees that way atleast in some part, all the major roman families could be represented instead of just one. Speaking of families though, I've noticed that in Atilla, your children are given random names. Has the AE team managed to work out a way to give your family members their family names? Furthermore, if someone marries into your family, is it possible for the children of this marriage to take their patrilineal name instead of the general name of the family?

[Linke]

No but you can add scripted children, give them only historical names; and reduce the spawning rate of normal randomly named kids to 0. You would get the same kids everytime though.

[Petellius]

We've got a new system for adding traits to children which simply wouldn't work with purely scripted children being added, so unfortunately we can only use the vanilla system.
Though I think once you see the new political trait system it will be worth the slight annoyance at some strange naming conventions.

[Julio-Claudian]

You can rename characters in the save parser once they're of age can't you?