The impractical aspects of the getup are more or less equivalent to what the OTL Great Powers used as their equipment at the start of WWI. The relatively peaceful period that followed the end of the French Revolutionary Wars caused modern militaries to gradually adopt a lot of decorative...
We'll see soon enough. Odysseus and Athena are both half-Ethiopian, and thus dark-skinned. And since Demetrios himself was a half-Mongol, the entire Sideroi family is going to have exotic features.
Sounds like Odysseus might abdicate and let Athena take over. It might be a good precedent, letting the more capable sibling rule. Or let Athena become the Chancellor perhaps?
If the Hungarian alliance breaks down or if the Poles get too strong or something, then Constantinople will have a vested interest in making sure that Vlachia can field a modern army on its own without Roman subsidies so that the northern front can be shielded. Scholarships and mechanization...
Even if serfdom is wretched, the Vlachs have little choice. Leaving aside the fact that aligning against Constantinople is outright suicidal, their land has no economic prospect outside of feeding the Romans. Their lands produce nothing of note outside of food, and they're full of mountainous on...
Hungary I can see flipping, since they have bad blood with the Vlachs. Helping the Poles against Orthodox Vlachia though? That has a chance of triggering a Russian intervention. Poles and Hungarians would be crazy to do that without a very large amount of German insurance backing them up. The...
Good, Romans have learned a hard lesson on the dangers of revanchism and extreme nationalism. They'll be more measured from now on. With a defensible frontier and an introverted stance on the geopolitical sphere, the Romans will quietly become giants.
I love that future Romans are going to look...
We don't want Romanization, those places have strong ethnic/cultural identities coalescing into proto-nationalist identities. If we load them up with Greek-Romans then they'll turn hostile against us.
Romantic Pluralist Nationalism could work. A Roman Empire in which the constituent parts are...
Federalization. Have the Imperial government give up power and give autonomy to various provinces, give them limited taxation powers, and give their representatives authority to influence imperial policy.
Excellent. This is like pre-WWI Germany, but one that had a chance to switch to a defensive, diplomatic focus instead of doubling down on Victory By Christmas gambles.
That's one way to fix a liquidity crisis: just loot everyone else. It worked for the United Kingdom in the Opium Wars, it should work fine for the Romans against the Ottomans too.
I can see the Romans just looting everything they can from Northern Italy and evacuating the peninsula. Strip Rome of all of its cultural artifacts and deny the Latins any form of Roman heritage.