A Helpful Note from your GM: If there's one thing you can trust the Praetorian Guard
never to do, it's forget about money.
Ever.
Have a look at
this, and tell me the name at the top of that list.
To be fair, that was because Aurelian blew an Intrigue check;
someone else who was terrified of Aurelian's wrath for having told a lie on some minor matter was all like "hey, as well hung for a sheep as for a lamb." So he forged a letter telling the Praetorians that he was going to purge a bunch of senior Roman officials, including Praetorian officers.
An illustration of the drawbacks of infamy and a reputation for mercilessly slaughtering and punishing all who turned against him. Which Aurelian had.
That said, your basic point is valid: the Praetorians are generally loyalish to those who pay them, and murderous to those who don't. Given that we're a high-Stewardship contender for the throne, we can probably afford to pay the biggest bribes, so that presents an obvious solution from our point of view.
Praetorian action is a bad idea, as they are offering to help us take Rome.
If we do so, we will be forced to fight Quintillus immediately and Aurelian shortly after, with depleted forces and before we can solidify our control over Italy.
Telamon said:
[] The Praetorians: The Praetorian Guard, the elite of the elite, the bodyguards (and the murderers) of emperors since the time of Augustus, have approached you in secret. The Praetorian Prefect, one Aemilianus Castor, who is currently the emperor's chief administrative aide, claims dissatisfaction with the base politicking and scheming of the Emperor Quintillus, and longs to serve under a soldier again, under a true Emperor. He offers to work towards bringing Quintillus' reign to a sudden and certain end, but suggests he will need a large amount of funds to enact a daring scheme which will end with Quintillus dead and Rome in Praetorian hands -- your hands.
--[] Minor Funding: You send Castor 200,000 denarii, enough to grease a few hands.
--[] Moderate Funding: You send Castor 400,000 denarii, enough to hire a small army.
--[] Major Funding: You send Castor 1,000,000 denarii -- 166 talents of gold, enough to hire a legion.
Quintillus, going by the option text, is geographically
IN Rome. His claim to the imperial throne comes from being the brother of the last emperor and being supported by the Senate. The Praetorians are offering to assassinate him as part of the coup. If the Praetorians succeed, Quintillus is out of the picture.
If we don't take Rome, we will have spent money for nothing because Aurelian will crush Quintillus and become the warrior emperor Praetorians want. They will quickly forget about our money.
We could do a lot worse than to immediately take Rome after establishing ourselves in Mediolanum, then use Mediolanum as a forward base and Rome as a resource base. With Quintillus dead and us having a working relationship with the Praetorians, the Senators have an incentive to align with us over other contenders. We can confiscate the fortunes of a number of Quintillus's closest supporters to help make up the cash we spent on the Praetorians.
Also, if we win, sooner or later we're going to have to deal with the Praetorians and we want them on our side. Aurelian claimed the
imperium ahead of us, as I understand it; he's already presumably received and may well turn down a similar offer, possibly because he can't afford it (we're likely to be richer than he is).
I mean, I'm actually tempted to take a death-or-glory approach and march on Rome against Quintillus while dumping a cool million denarii on the Praetorians, hoping that the sheer size of the bribe will cause them to take Rome in our name ahead of our legions, then letting us combine our forces with the Praetorians and whatever troops are in Rome to take on Aurelian after his forces are tired out from fighting the barbarians. It'd be one way of leveraging our biggest advantage (wealth and stewardship) against Aurelian's advantage (troop numbers and probably a marginal edge in military skill). The big reason I'm NOT doing it is because I think we need to flip Spain badly enough that we can't afford to blow the entire budget on funding the Praetorians.
...
Note that historically, Aurelian
WON. He's the guy who actually succeeded in reuniting the Empire, defeating all the other contenders listed in the post above us. We need a strategy for beating him or he'll probably kick our ass too. Historically, he spent a fair amount of time securing his control over the general area he's in as of our game start, fighting the barbarians and expelling them from the region before moving out to take on other contenders. The time he burns up there will be to our advantage, because it weakens his forces and weakens other threats to us. Even if he turns around and marches on us as soon as he gets word of the coup in Rome, he's still
between us and the barbarians, which makes it hard for him to fully disengage from them, plus they can ravage his own support base if he doesn't finish beating them before turning to face us.
Our best best against Aurelian is to exploit the (hopeful) possibility that his feet are nailed to the floor for a few turns while he wraps things up in and around Pannonia. If we're
very lucky, we may be able to grab Domitianus's troops for ourselves before turning south to Rome, but I'll want to see how things play out in Turn III before advocating that.
...
The way I see it, a temporary alliance with Zenobia and an effort to secure Rome actually fit together pretty well as an anti-Aurelian strategy. If Zenobia and ourselves have an understanding, she may be willing to continue grain shipments to Rome from her own provinces in the East. That gives us the means to support the city of Rome and keep the loyalty of the Roman mob-
Annona is a powerful goddess and not to be crossed lightly.
And
that, especially combined with holding Mediolanum in our name, gives us what is inherently a strong and rich support base from which to recruit and fortify Italia, while eating Aurelian's Hispanic support out from under him through subsidies and maybe troops if we can spare them. The combination of Italy and Spain is a strong one; it's what the Romans originally, historically built up into an empire in the first place.
Again, this leverages the strengths we chose in character generation (stewardship, wealth, and starting the civil war in a central province of the Empire closer to Rome than our rivals) against the advantages of our most dangerous opponent, namely his troops and military prowess- while taking advantage of his
weakness, which is that he's presently based out of relatively poor territory that's under direct military threat from the barbarians.
At that point, if we have to give him land to get his allegiance and risk letting barbarians settle on Roman lands, it's probably not worth it to bother with him anyway. I don't think that offering to give away land to foreigners like that is worth the long-term problems it'll bring with it.
The thing is, the chunk of Roman land we're offering him is on the far side of the Danube- the traditional and defensible frontier of the Empire. Holding land beyond the Danube is arguably more trouble than it's worth anyway, and one of the weaknesses of the Late Roman Empire was its failed efforts to hold a long and porous border with an increasingly weakened army. Eventually some other group of Goths, or maybe the Huns, will overrun the Marcomanni patch, but at least they'll get ground down a bit.
I'd
actively prefer to trade a little bit of land for time and space and troops and a meatshield against some future barbarian invasion that would otherwise slam right into us.
It's like, we record the practice of letting barbarians settle on Roman soil as a cause of the fall of the Empire, but this firstly neglects that the Romans could actively Romanize 'barbarians' who did so, bringing them into the system and invigorating it... And secondly, neglects that the very reason the Romans did it so many times was because
it worked. If you have land but lack the troops to defend it, trading the land for troops willing to fight for you is a good deal.
If we are going to go with the Take Mediolanum option and use Simon_Jester's Firm Foundation plan in order to avoid running into Aurelian, I'd prefer a change to addressing the Praetorians and Spain - namely out of concern of how much money we're spending right out of the gate. That kind of spending eats up well over half our bank account in a single turn, which I'm not comfortable with at all. Assuming we can choose to only choose to send troops or money, I think that sending troops to Spain is the better option.
The thing is, the bank account does us very little good if we don't immediately secure a strong position; it just turns us into a pinata for our enemies to beat on in hopes that money will fall out. As noted, our income stream from our estates is pretty minimal- it'd take two and a half years just to make up the cost of feeding our legions for a week! The only way we're going to get more money is if we spend it to create a strong, secure position that (if we take Rome) gives us the option of confiscating some senatorial fortunes to refill our own coffers.
We're going to be looking to avoid direct conflict with Aurelian anyway, and by spending major coin on both the Praetorians and Spain, I fear we risk running our bank account dangerously low this early on. Plus, they'd be known to be from an elite unit, compared to whatever forces that money pays for.
...What?
I mean, seriously. We can't win a fight with Aurelian unless we enlist additional legions and seize additional political support. Rome is a potential source of both. The thing is, we HAVE to beat Aurelian, because otherwise he'll probably beat US, the same way he historically beat all the other contenders who rose against him.
So we need to bulk up somehow, and we're not going to do that if we don't heavily invest our starting cash into territorial and prestige gains.
