Rome: Total War Gold Edition

[akots]

Originally Posted by Darkness

... I kind of get the feeling that they're more useful on the battlefield than as governors...

How many armies do you have active in the field? Probably 5-6, no more than that. All the rest of the generals can sit in a province and govern something. Especially those which have some kind of retinue or are good at public order maintenance. Also, if you are short on generals and every time you win a battle with a captain, you have some chance of this captain adoption in the family. IIRC, this chance significantly decreases when you have enough generals but I'm not sure about that. It is considerably faster way to get new generals than just wait for the game engine to offer adoption in case of shortage of generals. Sometimes you get a zero start general who might even have some negative battlefield trait or some bad retinue which decreases morale of the troops. This guy can be still trained to be a good general or you can leave him be and let him rot in some province as a governor. At least, this automatically guarantees gradual acquisition of some more or less useful traits depending on the buildings that are built there.

[Kingreno]

Family members' usefullness in battle decreases as the game progresses. As you cannot get decent cav till the middle/late game (as romans certainly)... This is ok as in the later game the familymembers are much needed for happyness in cities.