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Competitive Vortex Race

TWW2 is no longer getting patches or DLC, so my mods are also considered final and will not receive any more updates. Therefore I disabled comments on all of them to avoid constantly getting notifications for the same dumb questions that have been answered a thousand times already. Any comments or announcements I might make in the future will be posted under my collection here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1766089433

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Attempt to transform the fake Vortex race that the player can simply ignore into an actual, competitive race that can be lost.

In Vanilla, it is possible and actually preferable to simply ignore the Vortex rituals and either delay them until all of them are available and then do them all in direct succession - thus avoiding the diplomatic consequences for most of the game and just build up strength without interference from the Vortex mechanics. Or even never doing them at all and just let the AI win the race but then beat them in a single battle and still be declared the winner even though you have failed the campaign. The Vortex race is just a farce.


This mod tries to fix the race:

1. As soon as a ritual is available, you must enact it immediately or face harsh consequences
The Vortex race is supposedly an existential struggle to avert armageddon, so any intentional, avoidable delay should cause great alarm and unrest among your people and generals. Therefore, delaying an available ritual causes massive penalties to morale, income, upkeep and public order. These penalties disappear immediately when the available ritual is enacted, or when no ritual is currently available. This forces the player to engage with the Vortex race even when they have other, pressing matters on their hands or don't feel ready to defend the ritual cities.

2. Interventions are effectively disabled
They appear to be mostly ineffective anyway, but no more summoning of intervention armies out of thin air to attack hostile ritual sites. To interrupt rituals by AI rivals, you have to actually go there and do it yourself. The interventions now cost one million gold.

3. If an AI completes the final ritual first, the Final Battle is pretty much impossible to win
If you lose the race, you lose the game. The AI gets a massive Ward Save buff to all their units in the Final Battle if they won the race in the campaign, so the battle should be unwinnable. To win the game, win the race and get to the Final Battle first to fight it on your terms, or stop the AI completing their rituals.

4. Chaos/Norsca/Skaven incursions are stronger
The armies that infiltrate your territory when you enact rituals are much stronger. CA never even updated the armies to contain DLC units. Now they will contain much better units, especially for the later rituals. The AI get smaller incursions so they are unlikely to fail their rituals without the player doing anything.

5. Number of incursion armies is adjustable
By using the Mod Configuration Tool by Vandy, the number of armies spawned in incursions can be modified upwards or downwards.

6. Removed the rubber-banding for the AI
AI used to get free ritual currency whenever the player is ahead of them. Basically, no matter how well you played, all the AI rivals could never be further behind than 5 turns on VH or 8 turns on Normal. So there was no reason to aggressively go for ritual currency sites early in the game. This is now removed. The AI still get the static bonus per turn (also depends on difficulty) that they get in Vanilla, but you can leave them far behind if you earn a lot of ritual currency.

Recommended campaign settings and other mods
-to ensure that the rival factions don't simply fail on their own without player action, use my Unnatural Selection Ultimate mod and buff the three major factions you are competing against. Don't buff other factions, or at least give the main rivals significantly stronger buffs than the others
-do not use mods that disable/limit confederations as this will usually stop the AI rivals from becoming a real threat
-my mod AI Limited Expansion is also not recommended when playing a Vortex race, or at least not with settings that could limit the expansion of your Vortex rivals
-the other mods from my collection are compatible and recommended

The mod can stay enabled in the mod manager when playing Mortal Empires as it will simply not be loaded. When playing the Vortex campaign as a faction that does not take part in the Vortex race, it shouldn't interfere with anything, but just to be sure you may want to disable it for such campaigns.