It depends which period of Roman imperial history we're talking about. For most of its history the Roman Empire did not have 'max crown authority' - in the third century, it had the equivalent of 'autonomous vassals'. Likewise, the system of provincial government after Diocletian and Constantine was much more rigidly organised and centrally directed that it was under the Augustan principate. In the first century, most cities and local regions were effectively autonomous, with only a very thin layer of Roman provincial government laid on top; by the fifth century, that had changed drastically, and Roman provincial government was an immensely complex bureaucratic and military machine.
Well-made points, thank you. The kernel of the whole problem is exactly that the structure and administration of the empire was in a constant flux, and we can barely talk of any consistent system lasting for more than a couple of generations. Indeed (as for instance Clifford Ando has pointed out in his excellent monograph) it may be doubted whether the changing priorities of the autocratic rulers could have facilitated any planned development of the imperial administration in one direction or the other. It was, as with the sub-provincial projections of Roman rule, very much an 'on-the-go' process of ad-hoc compromises. And certainly not a uniform system in every part of the empire, even within the same chronological confines: the British or Germanic provinces were ruled in a markedly different way than, say, those of Asia Minor or the Syro-Palestinian region - which in turn were very unlike the civic/military and local/supraregional compromises struck in Aegyptus.
All in all, it's a fascinating complex of systems, but certainly something not easily amenable to representations in strategy games. One thing that could only barely be modelled (and incidentally one of my pet subjects within the field) is the inclusion of local elites, which can be argued to have been crucial for the overall success of the delegated Roman rule (and taxation: after all, following Chris Wickham, one can see the empire as basically just a large siphoning operation designed to yield maximum tax revenue with minimum investment of supervision and deployment). But how to model the interdependent provincial balance between centrally controlled military rule, locally powerful urban elites providing the administrative pool, and personal imperial patronage?
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