Note: A more recent version of this guide can be found over at the EUR Wiki. The content is more or less the same, but I've removed a number of unnecessary pictures, simplified and clarified some sections and have reorganised a number of things. Be gentle, this is my first ever wiki article 
Welcome to the first instalment of the Unofficial Strategy Guide! Most people have probably noticed that VV lacks any official strategy guide and is a little daunting for new players who didn't play the original game. This is an attempt to fix that.
Republics
Part 1: Choosing your country
There are a number of republic factions in the game, the two biggest by far being Rome and Carthage but a number of the smaller Greek states are also types of Republics. Which republic you choose is up to you: they're all the same in basic principle, but vary in the length of office terms and their respective bonuses. For now, we've chosen Rome to start with:
Update 2/20: For more information on republic types, look here and here.
Part 2: Before you unpause the game
The game starts, rather conveniently, already paused. This allows the player to arrange everything as he or she prefers, from trade routes to window layouts and so on. The first thing I always do is set the view to "Political Map Mode" by pressing "W" on the keyboard, opening up the event logs (the triangular button on the bottom, just before the minimap) and making sure the lists window is open (top right). These are all a matter of personal preference, though.
Next, you'll want to choose your National Ideas. Click the "Nation Overview" button, the little wreath at the top left of the screen.
As you'll see, Republics mostly have three National Ideas slots (Republic Confederacies, however, only have two). You can choose any of the Ideas from the subsequent lists, but you only get the bonus for your type of Republic if you choose from the right categories. In the case of the Roman ("Military" type) Republic, you'd need to choose two Military ideas and one Civic idea to get the bonus, which is a reduction on war exhaustion. Doing so would mean your country suffers less from waging war than other countries, and is quicker at recovering from them.
In this example, we've decided not to go with the military republic bonus and have chosen the "Professional Infantry" (makes heavy infantry more efficient at killing), "Civic Duty" (actual effect is debatable, but it either gives a defensive bonus to all units, or it just makes forts last longer in assaults) and "Citizenship" (increases the rate at which Freedmen convert to Citizens--very important if you want to conquer anything and still remain in the tech race!).
Next, we need to set up our trade routes. Click the "Trade Map Mode" button next to the minimap or press "T" on your keyboard to show the trade routes available.
As you'll see, Rome has just about everything she needs at first, but most notably lacks access to horses. Cavalry play an important part in damaging the morale of your enemy in battles; if they can access the enemy flank, the enemy morale will drop more quickly. Look around the map for provinces with cavalry and try to trade with them. VV has introduced a more efficient interface for opening up foreign trade routes (see screenshot below). Unfortunately, all three Cavalry provinces with access to the sea refused to trade, but try anyway.
Once you've tried foreign trade for important trade goods (you will have to unpause the game for a few days before you can see how the requests went), you can pause the game again and look for internal trade routes. If you fill up all internal routes, you can look again for foreign trade; in this case, we managed to get fish, grain and papyrus from various other countries.
Part 3: Character development
Before you unpause the game again, open up the Character browser. You'll notice that some characters don't have jobs; if you leave them like that, they'll slowly gain Populist conviction (not a good thing) and will lose loyalty (even worse).
Click the "Men" filter button at the top of the window: you'll want to give every man who is older than 18 a minor title so they don't become a part of the Populist menace. (Note: with the VV2.2 patch, you can now click the "Unemployed" filter and it won't show women and children any more. This makes it a much easier method of finding characters who need titles than using the "Men" filter.) You only have a limited number of titles to give, but you should have enough for one per character with a few left over. Start with giving them the title of Military Tribune, since you have more of them to give away. If characters have the objective of gaining a specific title, giving them that title will increase their conviction for that particular job, pulling them even further away from the Populists.
You'll also notice that some male characters can't be given a title. Only characters over the age of 18 can be given a title, so from the age of 16 characters will start gaining Populist conviction that you can't stop. Take note of the characters you can't give a job to, and give them one as soon as you can. In this case, N. Fabius Buteo is only 17 so I know he'll be properly maturing in a year's time and will give him a title then.
Remember to revisit this screen every couple of years to give titles to any characters that might have matured in that time.
Part 4: War!
Because we went with the Pyrrhic War bookmark, we start off at war with Magna Graecia and Epirus. First things first, then: we need to choose a general for our Legions in the south. Click on the army and hover your cursor over the words "No Current Leader" and a tooltip will tell you what the requirements for being a Legate (general) your characters will need.
In short, as a Republic you need a male character who has been either a current or former Consul or a former Praetor, or has already been given special appointment as a Legate (more on that later), and he can't have any other major offices (minor titles are ok). At this point, your pool of potential Legates is rather shallow:
Oh well, he'll do. Note that you can't change legates or naval prefects (admirals) for at least a year after you've appointed them, so if you have a choice you'll have to choose carefully.
You'll also find that having armies or navies larger than 4 units will prompt the Senate into giving special commands to certain characters.
Your choices are, essentially: give them the command (they'll have it for at least a year, but will expect to have it for at least two) or risk them turning Populist. This character was already a Populist, but his conviction was low enough that he has a chance to convert later on. I don't intend on using my fleet in this war, so I may as well accept the Senate's demands.
A little tip: if a character has the ambition to "Become Legate" or "Become Naval Prefect", then giving them that position will give them +1 Martial permanently. Nice.
You can now unpause the game again and wage your war.
Part 5: The Senate
After our war, I decided that I wanted to give my consul a Triumph for his effots. Finding his character window, you can normally give him a Triumph from there, but the Senate seemed keen to block his request:
To find the cause of this, we'll click on any province and hover the cursor over the little red X next to the "Hold Triumph" button.
This seems a little confusing at first, but the basics are as follows: every political faction has a certain predisposition towards certain actions ("Faction Opinion"), while being a member of a faction and/or its leader means that more of the Senate will accept your proposal. Having high popularity helps, too. In this case, our esteemed Consul has rather low popularity, and subsequently only 39/99 Senators agree with giving him a Triumph. An action requires at least 40/99 approval in order for you to be able to do it, but unless there is at least 60/99 approval your ruler will also suffer a popularity hit.
At this point, the next Consular elections happened, giving us the perfect chance to check out the Senate window.
Here, you can see who is going to be the next Consul. Things may well change, though.
You can see with those two tooltips a similar layout to the Triumph part before. A lot of it is out of the player's direct control, but there are a few things you can do to influence the next elections. If you really want a specific character in power, you can try to increase their popularity through their actions, particularly on the battlefield. Alternatively, you can try to use the "Smear Reputation" action against the characters next in line to be Consul until you get to the one you want. The chance of success for any internal intrigue actions, such as "Smear Reputation" or "Assassinate" depends on the Finesse level of your Consul.
From this window, you can also see the breakdown of the Senate.
Political Attraction depends on a few big things: the faction leader (note that the Populist leader has a bigger bonus for this!), characters with government offices and other faction-specific modifiers (militarists gain power when you have cores on foreign provinces and have long periods of peace; mercantilists gain power when there are unused trade routes, etc). The character modifiers depend on their Charisma rating, so if you have to appoint Populists to an office, make sure he has low Charisma.
Back to the Consul's effects, now: having a Consul from a certain faction will give you bonuses associated with that faction. In addition, you'll also be able to change National Ideas in the same category as your Consul's main conviction. Our new Consul is another Militarist, so we can change any of our National Ideas to a Military one without penalty:
You can still change to other National Ideas, but they will incur a -3 Stability penalty. Note that Populist Consuls will automatically change one of your NI's when they come to power, so try to avoid getting them in power whenever possible!
And finally, since more than a year has passed since the start of the game, we can now start appointing new characters to public office. However, since their term of 2 years hasn't been reached yet, they will suffer some penalties:
As such, it's probably a good idea to keep most of them in power until their terms have expired. However, as we're running low on potential legates, we can change the Praetor. This time, he has a slightly better Martial skill (7; I usually consider 8 or more to be preferable), so when his one year minimum term is up we can replace him and have him ready in our legate pool.
Note also that the characters all give further bonuses to certain aspects of government, based on their other skills (usually Martial and Charisma) as well as the tech bonus for high Finesse. Hover your cursor over the icon to the right of the progress bar to see what those bonuses are.
And there are the main concepts behind playing Republics. If any of the information in this guide is incorrect or unclear, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as possible. Hope it helps!
Appendix A: Populism
One of the most common questions in the forums is: how do you deal with populists? Most people start to get concerned about the populist faction when they have 50% or more Senate influence, but some people have reported a populist faction with 90% influence or more!
First, it's important to note the distinction between the populists in the Senate and populist characters. There is no direct link between characters and the senate. Having characters in office might increase a faction's political attraction, and having a strong faction might influence some events that affect characters, but by and large you should think of them as being entirely different mechanics.
Populist Characters
Characters have "conviction" towards each of the political factions. Conviction is measured as a numerical value: the highest of these values determines which faction a character will join. You can see this number by checking the tooltip for the character's portrait. This is a picture from earlier in this guide:
You can see the conviction in parentheses just after the words "Military Faction". His other convictions are deliberately hidden to keep the player guessing, but I find that if a character has less than 15-20 conviction for a specific faction then he is still pretty easily converted to another faction.
Now, how to convert a character to another faction? The easiest way to do this is to give him the jobs that he desires. If a character has an objective, achieving that objective usually gives him conviction towards a specific faction. For example, a character wanting to be a general will gain Military conviction if he gets that job; as such, I find it helpful to have a "spare" army for just such characters (which is, incidentally, very handy for taking out revolts).
If a character has an objective to gain a title and doesn't have any titles at all, he'll automatically gain populist conviction at a rate of 0.1 per month. This means that after a couple of years, he'll likely join the populist faction, which you'll usually want to avoid. There are also some events that may increase a character's populist conviction. If he's an important character, chances are you'll want to avoid these.
Populist Senate
In the senate, there are factors that contribute to each faction's "attraction". Attraction is a percentage value that shows how much that faction will grow in the following months. The faction with the highest attraction will gain senators in the following months, while the other factions will lose senators.
Note that the 2.3 beta patch has changed a number of these attraction factors (and has thankfully opened them up for modding!), so I won't go into great detail about them, while the main factors are already explained in the main guide. The first thing you'll need to do is simply remove any populists from public office.
The populist faction leader's Charisma value has a higher impact on his faction's attraction value than any other. Other factions gain a bonus equal to (charisma -1)*1, populists instead get a bonus equal to (charisma -1)*4. So, a Military leader with 5 Charisma would only give a bonus of 4%, while a Populist leader with 5 Charisma would give a bonus of 16%. As a general rule of thumb, I like to avoid having populist leaders with a Charisma level greater than 4. Just imprison any populist leader who is too influential, it's far safer than trying to assassinate them (less of a Tyranny penalty).
Now, there may come a time when you simply cannot control your populist senate. You may have neglected to check the screen for a few years during an intense war, or you may not have known how to do it. Either way, there are two ways to get rid of the populists. The slow way involves the same principles as above. The quick way involves allowing a Populist Civil War, which may weaken your state considerably but will re-balance your senate immediately. It's up to you which way you want to go.
To trigger a populist civil war, the populists need to have a majority control of the senate, but your consul needs to be a non-populist. Note that a regular civil war will not balance the senate. The stronger the populists are, the more likely it is that a civil war will start.
Once you've won the civil war, you can then follow the normal anti-populist measures mentioned above and you shouldn't have a problem with them again.
Cheers, and happy populist hunting
Welcome to the first instalment of the Unofficial Strategy Guide! Most people have probably noticed that VV lacks any official strategy guide and is a little daunting for new players who didn't play the original game. This is an attempt to fix that.
Republics
Part 1: Choosing your country
There are a number of republic factions in the game, the two biggest by far being Rome and Carthage but a number of the smaller Greek states are also types of Republics. Which republic you choose is up to you: they're all the same in basic principle, but vary in the length of office terms and their respective bonuses. For now, we've chosen Rome to start with:
Update 2/20: For more information on republic types, look here and here.
Part 2: Before you unpause the game
The game starts, rather conveniently, already paused. This allows the player to arrange everything as he or she prefers, from trade routes to window layouts and so on. The first thing I always do is set the view to "Political Map Mode" by pressing "W" on the keyboard, opening up the event logs (the triangular button on the bottom, just before the minimap) and making sure the lists window is open (top right). These are all a matter of personal preference, though.
Next, you'll want to choose your National Ideas. Click the "Nation Overview" button, the little wreath at the top left of the screen.
As you'll see, Republics mostly have three National Ideas slots (Republic Confederacies, however, only have two). You can choose any of the Ideas from the subsequent lists, but you only get the bonus for your type of Republic if you choose from the right categories. In the case of the Roman ("Military" type) Republic, you'd need to choose two Military ideas and one Civic idea to get the bonus, which is a reduction on war exhaustion. Doing so would mean your country suffers less from waging war than other countries, and is quicker at recovering from them.
In this example, we've decided not to go with the military republic bonus and have chosen the "Professional Infantry" (makes heavy infantry more efficient at killing), "Civic Duty" (actual effect is debatable, but it either gives a defensive bonus to all units, or it just makes forts last longer in assaults) and "Citizenship" (increases the rate at which Freedmen convert to Citizens--very important if you want to conquer anything and still remain in the tech race!).
Next, we need to set up our trade routes. Click the "Trade Map Mode" button next to the minimap or press "T" on your keyboard to show the trade routes available.
As you'll see, Rome has just about everything she needs at first, but most notably lacks access to horses. Cavalry play an important part in damaging the morale of your enemy in battles; if they can access the enemy flank, the enemy morale will drop more quickly. Look around the map for provinces with cavalry and try to trade with them. VV has introduced a more efficient interface for opening up foreign trade routes (see screenshot below). Unfortunately, all three Cavalry provinces with access to the sea refused to trade, but try anyway.
Once you've tried foreign trade for important trade goods (you will have to unpause the game for a few days before you can see how the requests went), you can pause the game again and look for internal trade routes. If you fill up all internal routes, you can look again for foreign trade; in this case, we managed to get fish, grain and papyrus from various other countries.
Part 3: Character development
Before you unpause the game again, open up the Character browser. You'll notice that some characters don't have jobs; if you leave them like that, they'll slowly gain Populist conviction (not a good thing) and will lose loyalty (even worse).
Click the "Men" filter button at the top of the window: you'll want to give every man who is older than 18 a minor title so they don't become a part of the Populist menace. (Note: with the VV2.2 patch, you can now click the "Unemployed" filter and it won't show women and children any more. This makes it a much easier method of finding characters who need titles than using the "Men" filter.) You only have a limited number of titles to give, but you should have enough for one per character with a few left over. Start with giving them the title of Military Tribune, since you have more of them to give away. If characters have the objective of gaining a specific title, giving them that title will increase their conviction for that particular job, pulling them even further away from the Populists.
You'll also notice that some male characters can't be given a title. Only characters over the age of 18 can be given a title, so from the age of 16 characters will start gaining Populist conviction that you can't stop. Take note of the characters you can't give a job to, and give them one as soon as you can. In this case, N. Fabius Buteo is only 17 so I know he'll be properly maturing in a year's time and will give him a title then.
Remember to revisit this screen every couple of years to give titles to any characters that might have matured in that time.
Part 4: War!
Because we went with the Pyrrhic War bookmark, we start off at war with Magna Graecia and Epirus. First things first, then: we need to choose a general for our Legions in the south. Click on the army and hover your cursor over the words "No Current Leader" and a tooltip will tell you what the requirements for being a Legate (general) your characters will need.
In short, as a Republic you need a male character who has been either a current or former Consul or a former Praetor, or has already been given special appointment as a Legate (more on that later), and he can't have any other major offices (minor titles are ok). At this point, your pool of potential Legates is rather shallow:
Oh well, he'll do. Note that you can't change legates or naval prefects (admirals) for at least a year after you've appointed them, so if you have a choice you'll have to choose carefully.
You'll also find that having armies or navies larger than 4 units will prompt the Senate into giving special commands to certain characters.
Your choices are, essentially: give them the command (they'll have it for at least a year, but will expect to have it for at least two) or risk them turning Populist. This character was already a Populist, but his conviction was low enough that he has a chance to convert later on. I don't intend on using my fleet in this war, so I may as well accept the Senate's demands.
A little tip: if a character has the ambition to "Become Legate" or "Become Naval Prefect", then giving them that position will give them +1 Martial permanently. Nice.
You can now unpause the game again and wage your war.
Part 5: The Senate
After our war, I decided that I wanted to give my consul a Triumph for his effots. Finding his character window, you can normally give him a Triumph from there, but the Senate seemed keen to block his request:
To find the cause of this, we'll click on any province and hover the cursor over the little red X next to the "Hold Triumph" button.
This seems a little confusing at first, but the basics are as follows: every political faction has a certain predisposition towards certain actions ("Faction Opinion"), while being a member of a faction and/or its leader means that more of the Senate will accept your proposal. Having high popularity helps, too. In this case, our esteemed Consul has rather low popularity, and subsequently only 39/99 Senators agree with giving him a Triumph. An action requires at least 40/99 approval in order for you to be able to do it, but unless there is at least 60/99 approval your ruler will also suffer a popularity hit.
At this point, the next Consular elections happened, giving us the perfect chance to check out the Senate window.
Here, you can see who is going to be the next Consul. Things may well change, though.
You can see with those two tooltips a similar layout to the Triumph part before. A lot of it is out of the player's direct control, but there are a few things you can do to influence the next elections. If you really want a specific character in power, you can try to increase their popularity through their actions, particularly on the battlefield. Alternatively, you can try to use the "Smear Reputation" action against the characters next in line to be Consul until you get to the one you want. The chance of success for any internal intrigue actions, such as "Smear Reputation" or "Assassinate" depends on the Finesse level of your Consul.
From this window, you can also see the breakdown of the Senate.
Political Attraction depends on a few big things: the faction leader (note that the Populist leader has a bigger bonus for this!), characters with government offices and other faction-specific modifiers (militarists gain power when you have cores on foreign provinces and have long periods of peace; mercantilists gain power when there are unused trade routes, etc). The character modifiers depend on their Charisma rating, so if you have to appoint Populists to an office, make sure he has low Charisma.
Back to the Consul's effects, now: having a Consul from a certain faction will give you bonuses associated with that faction. In addition, you'll also be able to change National Ideas in the same category as your Consul's main conviction. Our new Consul is another Militarist, so we can change any of our National Ideas to a Military one without penalty:
You can still change to other National Ideas, but they will incur a -3 Stability penalty. Note that Populist Consuls will automatically change one of your NI's when they come to power, so try to avoid getting them in power whenever possible!
And finally, since more than a year has passed since the start of the game, we can now start appointing new characters to public office. However, since their term of 2 years hasn't been reached yet, they will suffer some penalties:
As such, it's probably a good idea to keep most of them in power until their terms have expired. However, as we're running low on potential legates, we can change the Praetor. This time, he has a slightly better Martial skill (7; I usually consider 8 or more to be preferable), so when his one year minimum term is up we can replace him and have him ready in our legate pool.
Note also that the characters all give further bonuses to certain aspects of government, based on their other skills (usually Martial and Charisma) as well as the tech bonus for high Finesse. Hover your cursor over the icon to the right of the progress bar to see what those bonuses are.
And there are the main concepts behind playing Republics. If any of the information in this guide is incorrect or unclear, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as possible. Hope it helps!
Appendix A: Populism
One of the most common questions in the forums is: how do you deal with populists? Most people start to get concerned about the populist faction when they have 50% or more Senate influence, but some people have reported a populist faction with 90% influence or more!
First, it's important to note the distinction between the populists in the Senate and populist characters. There is no direct link between characters and the senate. Having characters in office might increase a faction's political attraction, and having a strong faction might influence some events that affect characters, but by and large you should think of them as being entirely different mechanics.
Populist Characters
Characters have "conviction" towards each of the political factions. Conviction is measured as a numerical value: the highest of these values determines which faction a character will join. You can see this number by checking the tooltip for the character's portrait. This is a picture from earlier in this guide:
You can see the conviction in parentheses just after the words "Military Faction". His other convictions are deliberately hidden to keep the player guessing, but I find that if a character has less than 15-20 conviction for a specific faction then he is still pretty easily converted to another faction.
Now, how to convert a character to another faction? The easiest way to do this is to give him the jobs that he desires. If a character has an objective, achieving that objective usually gives him conviction towards a specific faction. For example, a character wanting to be a general will gain Military conviction if he gets that job; as such, I find it helpful to have a "spare" army for just such characters (which is, incidentally, very handy for taking out revolts).
If a character has an objective to gain a title and doesn't have any titles at all, he'll automatically gain populist conviction at a rate of 0.1 per month. This means that after a couple of years, he'll likely join the populist faction, which you'll usually want to avoid. There are also some events that may increase a character's populist conviction. If he's an important character, chances are you'll want to avoid these.
Populist Senate
In the senate, there are factors that contribute to each faction's "attraction". Attraction is a percentage value that shows how much that faction will grow in the following months. The faction with the highest attraction will gain senators in the following months, while the other factions will lose senators.
Note that the 2.3 beta patch has changed a number of these attraction factors (and has thankfully opened them up for modding!), so I won't go into great detail about them, while the main factors are already explained in the main guide. The first thing you'll need to do is simply remove any populists from public office.
The populist faction leader's Charisma value has a higher impact on his faction's attraction value than any other. Other factions gain a bonus equal to (charisma -1)*1, populists instead get a bonus equal to (charisma -1)*4. So, a Military leader with 5 Charisma would only give a bonus of 4%, while a Populist leader with 5 Charisma would give a bonus of 16%. As a general rule of thumb, I like to avoid having populist leaders with a Charisma level greater than 4. Just imprison any populist leader who is too influential, it's far safer than trying to assassinate them (less of a Tyranny penalty).
Now, there may come a time when you simply cannot control your populist senate. You may have neglected to check the screen for a few years during an intense war, or you may not have known how to do it. Either way, there are two ways to get rid of the populists. The slow way involves the same principles as above. The quick way involves allowing a Populist Civil War, which may weaken your state considerably but will re-balance your senate immediately. It's up to you which way you want to go.
To trigger a populist civil war, the populists need to have a majority control of the senate, but your consul needs to be a non-populist. Note that a regular civil war will not balance the senate. The stronger the populists are, the more likely it is that a civil war will start.
Once you've won the civil war, you can then follow the normal anti-populist measures mentioned above and you shouldn't have a problem with them again.
Cheers, and happy populist hunting
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