It would be interesting to see the possibilities of hiring other demons.For example, In the portal building.

@Eressea De Haran - Yesterday I had the idea to look into making it easier to hire units from other factions, which is similar, but also slightly different.

What sort of demons did you have in mind? Other Tzeentch demons or demons from other chaos gods?

I think we can try to add the hiring of other gods' demons.

It doesn't look like there's currently any good way to make allied recruitment easier.

On another note; I'm playing with the idea of letting The Changeling capture up to 9 provincial capitals using a limited currency like herdstone shards.the Beastmen use. It may take a while to implement and test it out though

The problem I find with The Changeling at the moment is that the campaign is less fun when you don't have to worry about enemy attacks, and this might help with that.

What could be super interesting is if you could take over a city completely using this shard system and act if it became your city, recruit units from that race and such... And with the shard system it would mean you have to choose wisely which races/cities you want to puppet while drawing some extra attention from the AI to make things more interesting.
Otherwise, maybe make it so the AI has easier time getting rid of your cults ?

If I were to go with the captured city idea, I'd have to remake all the buildings and units of every faction for The Changeling's faction, so that's too much work unfortunately.

I'm not entirely sure how to make the AI better at removing cults either though unfortunately. Discoverability is a hard-coded value, to change how much Discoverability a building produces, or a character reduces, you have to edit the database. You can't change those things mid-gameplay, which is disappointing. I'm also not sure that it would really bring the same level of strategic interest that defending an empire does.

It would be more interesting if the cults had garrisons too, and maybe you had garrison vs garrison fights in the settlement, but I'm not sure if that can be done or not. I suspect not since there's only 1 garrison interface for a settlement. So at best you could give the settlement owner Tzeentchian units to control.

Ultimately I keep running into the limitations of the game mechanics.

If I let The Changeling capture some settlements then that gives players something to both defend and attack (if they're against The Changeling). The question then becomes, how would that fit into things lore-wise? Why would The Changeling need a fortress, and why would he defend it? What is it doing? What's the scheme? I'm still thinking on that part.

And make it like ogre camps?

I see... Maybe a work-around could be diplomacy : if we have a way to force-vassalize/ally factions more easily, you'd want to protect your "puppets" that would be boosted by your symbiotic cults, which would give the feeling you're looking for. Also would allow Changeling to get access to allied regiments more easily, maybe add techs/skills to improve stats of allied units for example to go alongside that road. What do you think ?

I thought the Ogre Camps would've been cooler than the cults, but CA didn't go that way, and I suppose it makes sense to have the cults be in the cities rather than camps in the outskirts. I'm open to ideas for making use of Ogre Camps in a balanced way.

And yeah, I'm looking for ways to encourage making allies and using allied recruitment more. Maybe making allied units cheaper in both cost and upkeep could help. As well as rewards/buffs for allied units.

I've been hesitant to do much with Vassals, since they're likely more a liability than an asset, given The Changeling's far-reaching objectives. But maybe I could come up with an interactive vassalization system. I've had ideas for dynamically generated missions, or mission chains. So maybe you can spawn a chain of missions with dynamic objectives that, when completed, rewards you with a vassal and maybe makes them stronger in some way. Maybe some choice points in the process, and maybe you get to alter the vassal faction in some way. I'd have to think on it.

The challenge in developing these things is making sure it's fun, worthwhile, engaging, and not too overpowered. The amount of time a player puts into something needs to be rewarded with something they feel is fair and the process needs to be fun.

I like the idea that you alter the vassal faction, altho unsure about how to do it. Also to make sure they are not a liability you can just reduce the cost of taking control of their army by a hefty amount I suppose. If you could pull something like that up it could be a super interesting change for the Changeling.

So far the way I personally see it, Cults in Cities are the "safest" economic route to fund your forces, but I feel they should not be how the faction can live on, I felt that Cult Encampments (Ogre Camps) are the real places of power, where if you lose both your camps and armies, even with still active cults its game over.

it would work kind of like the Grudgebringers faction, where you over time can get more armies and establish more Cult Encampments as time goes on, to show your influence and power growing.

Cult Encampments would be hidden, but can be spotted if an army walks right across them, or if a Decievers army is destroyed (the idea being that information is found on the destroyed army) it reveals a nearby Encampment

outside of that, I wondered if you might be willing to add the ability to set how much income of cult supplies you can get, for a little bit of extra modification alongside all the other options that you have provided

I'll have to look into the camps ideas some more before I can say anything for sure on it.

I also thought about adding a setting for a bonus to your economy, so I don't mind adding that, but it won't reflect in the UI as your true income.

I appreciate the all suggestions so far; it helps to toss ideas around.

This is a great help to the Deceivers. May I ask that you consider attempting to cap his diplomacy bonus he gets from his Symbiotic diplomacy buildings?

As is, it just builds throughout the campaign until he has 100+ in positive attitude from those buildings. I've tried capping it in a script myself, but I just can't get it to work beyond limiting how much it increases each turn.

In one of the patch notes from CA they mentioned they changed how that value works, and how it decays/falls off over time. I'm not sure if there's a way for me to limit further it without it also affecting all other factions.

With only a single building generating positive relations, the cap is 30 I think, but this soft cap increases for each additional building built within that faction's borders, so CA has tried to cap it to some degree already, but the way they worded it made it sound like it was a change to all diplomacy, not just for The Changeling.

I suspect that further limiting wouldn't provide a true cap, but only reduce the soft cap from 30 to maybe 20, but if you continue to build those buildings, it'll continue to raise that soft cap. And again, I think that would apply to all factions diplomacy with each other.