Some thoughts on Carthage

I did my first ever test game that ran for more than, like, a year :p (in fact it ran for 14 years before I quit). What I noticed was that Carthage was being pwned by everyone and their mother. So I looked at what the problem was: turns out they're severely overextended. That's not so strange, since they're an aristocratic monarchy, and they're huge. So I started thinking: how do we solve this problem? I can't make them an empire as that's just not realistic for 650BC. This is what I came up with.

- Carthage should be a small nation, maybe 4 provinces or so, that is an aristocratic monarchy.
- It should have a bunch of vassals of Phoenician culture. (Carthage itself is Carthaginian culture)
- There should also be a number of Phoenician city-states that are not vassals of Carthage, e.g. Malaca (nowadays Malaga) and Gadir (nowadays Cadiz), perhaps allied to Carthage.
- Once Carthage either owns, or has as vassal, certain provinces (probably the ones Carthage owns in the current version of the mod), it can enact a decision. This decision will 1) trigger a "join or war" event for the vassalized city-states, 2) give Carthage a core on each of the vassal states, 3) make Carthage a federated republic.
- Above decision can also be taken by any of the other Phoenician city-states in the Western Mediterranean.
- Once the federated republic is formed, and all the cores are owned, Carthage (or the one who enacted the decision) gets an event that gives the choice of either some decentralization, or a number of fortresses get destroyed. This is to reflect the fact that Carthage demanded its subject cities to demolish their city walls, and makes for a nice setback so that the Carthaginians hopefully have something to do (repair their city walls) before they can go on rampage throughout the Mediterranean :p.

Nice thoughts.
I think that Carthage should have also some decisions to improve their fleet, like Venice has in vanilla.

Also, Sardinia should be indipendent in 650BC. Carthage tryed to establish its power on the island but failed for almost all of the VI century BC (in 534BC they suffered a severe defeat against the local tribes). So what I think we should do is this: split the island in two parts with the northern one hold by the Balari and the southern by the Iolei/Iliensi, both should be of the nuragic culture group.
If we want to go deeper in details the island should be split in four parts: Balari, Iliensi, Kalaris (city-state) hold or vassal of Carthege and Corsi in the north-east part of the island. The corsi were another nuragic population that inhabited Corsica and part of Sardinia in the VI century BC. Corsica too should be indipendent since the Etruscans weren't able to control it before the half of the VI century (they could have a mission at the very beginning to conquer it).

To make everything clearer I made a little map:

Spoiler: