Of course I guess this almost only works if you are very rich because however they never accept. However if you have common allies with your protectorates that may betray you, betray them first otherwise like it happened with the Thracians in my Pontic campaign they will side with your ennemy and break the protectorate, if you attack the common ally first they'll side with you and keep the status. All cheat codes are case-sensitive and should be entered exactly as shown below, but some can only be used a single time in a campaign. Plus I mean, the advantage of doing that is that you can't lose that protectorate status since they can't betray you, they aren't neighbouring you! It's the first time I do that but I'm definitely going to try that again in my next campaigns cuz let's face it, what's cooler than having the ennemy kneel to you and offer their surrender without lifting a finger? The Rome: Total War cheats and cheat codes will help give you that extra edge when playing the single-player grand campaign and scenarios. What sucks is when the Senate tells you to get so and so as your protectorate and you have to give them 100,000. I think protectorates can be very useful if you have a rich empire, get military access from your allies and fight their ennemies, win a few important battles, take some cities that you give back to your allies and then usually they'll accept protectorate if you offer enough money. I accepted a protectorate once to gain sometime but it didn't help since they betrayed it the same turn, its useless. As I said in the other thread, in my current Pontus campaign I have the Romans under protectorate and at one point I had the Thracians but for both I had to give hundreds of thousands of denarii, the only time a faction accepted without receiving money was once in vanilla on the Germans but they had only 1 region left so it wasn't that much use.

Rome total war protectorate