Slitherine

Hi folks, I'm getting back into this game after a long break and I'm wondering what triggers the option for Rome to switch from a republic to an empire? I used to think it was triggered by conquering at least seven provinces, but in my current game that hasn't happened. Are there other markers that need to be hit for this decision to appear?
TIA,
Jay

I think you need to go up the civ levels a couple of times iirc.

The Roman Empire is a tier 3 government. To swap to it has all the normal requirements to become a tier three. Rome starts as a tier 2 young republic. Tier 3 governments require you have at least 10 territories to promote to it. (Rome starts with 3 so you need to pick up at least 7 more as you noted.) In addition you need to get the progress tokens to promote to it, this mean you need at least 15 progress token to promote to a tier three government. (5 to go from young to stable, 5 stable to glorious, and 5 to go from glorious to young+1 tier.) This can get a bit more complicated if you start to collecting aging tokens as they annihilate 1 to 1 with progress tokens and 5 aging tokens will cause your nation to decline. (5 aging tokens will take young/stable/glorious government to old, 5 more will decline old to decadent, 5 more will decline decadent to stable-1 tier.) Declining also tends to cause civil wars. Both old and decadent governments progress to stable of the same tier with 5 progress tokens.

So The young Roman republic needs to acquire a minimum 15 net progress tokens, and at least 7 more territories (for a total of 10) to become the young Roman Empire.

P.S. I think I answered the question. If you have anymore questions about progressing/aging let me know I'll try to answer them. I didn't want to get to off topic so I only talked about essential bits associated with swapping from republic to empire, and tried to avoid getting to off topic with why you want to tier up/avoid aging down.

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply, it's greatly appreciated. I'll go and away and digest this info, and will post another reply if I need (even!) more help...!
Cheers,
Jay.