Subscribe to download
Dynamic Faction Strength & Starting Armies

This mod can slightly alter starting armies and lets you group AI factions to adjust their strength (Faction Potential) with a fine degree of control. More details below. Don't forget to hover over the ? next to MCT options if you're unsure of what they do.

Starting armies can be modified in a few ways to make faction starts a bit different each time. These settings must be configured in MCT before you start a new campaign, and only apply to AI factions by default.
Starting armies have a chance to have some of their non-character units duplicated. The chance of a unit being duplicated depends on the unit Tier. Both duplication chance and rate are configurable with MCT.
Starting armies have a (configurable) chance to start in an Ambush stance.
Starting armies have a chance to have some of their movement points reduced. Both the chance and reduction amount are configurable with MCT.

Faction Potential is a hidden number CA uses to determine how many bonuses an AI faction gets. This has a major impact on the effectiveness of AI factions. The higher a faction's Faction Potential, the "stronger" the faction is. Factions with a higher Faction Potential tend to beat faction's with a lower Faction Potential, but unit quality and quantity matter too!
This mod groups factions into Faction Potential Groups (Faction Groups), letting you configure the Faction Potential, and faction bonuses, of every faction within the group. You must start a campaign to see these settings, they cannot be seen from the Main Menu.

You get 3 predefined Faction Groups to make setup easy; All Factions, All Playable Factions, and All Non-Playable Factions. You can change the Faction Potential and faction bonuses of these groups, but you cannot change the factions assigned to them.

You also get 10 generic Faction Groups that are 100% configurable, letting you add factions, change their Faction Potential, and configure their faction bonuses. These groups and their settings are saved to your game directory, and are automatically loaded with each new campaign to make things easy. Some faction names have suffixes that help you tell them apart; (N) = Non-playable and (Q) = Quest Factions CA uses for quest/mission battles.
Grouped factions will have their Faction Potential set to the number you specify, up to 400. That number is then modified (+/-) based on Campaign Difficulty (if enabled), and then modified again (+/-) based on a random number selected from a range you define. These two modifiers let you add some variability to each campaign, to keep things fresh.
All the vanilla bonuses AI factions get will be listed for you to tweak. They're set at vanilla values by default. Every AI faction in the Faction Group will get these bonuses, however the strength of the bonus depends on their Faction Potential (FP).

For example; with default values, a faction with 400 FP gets -80% to their building construction costs, while a faction at 0 FP gets only -10%. Therefore, a faction at 200 FP gets -35% to their building construction costs. You can change the range of each bonus, or set both the min and max value to 0 to disable it.

The Do Stuff button will reset the currently selected group to its default settings. The text on this button cannot be changed in the current version of MCT. The text it should have is to the left of it.

You can set which of the 13 Faction Groups is active in your current campaign. Turn them on or off at any time. You can even set which groups are active at the Main Menu to start future campaigns with those groups active by default.

Active groups will overwrite each other in the order they are displayed in the menu. For example; if you have both the All Factions group and Group 1 active, and Group 1 only contains Lizardmen factions, the settings in the All Factions group will not apply to the Lizardmen factions in Group 1, as Group 1 will overwrite those settings.

This should be compatible with Mixer and other mods that add new factions or cultures. The All Playable Factions and All Non-Playable Factions groups will automatically update accordingly.

Let me know if you have any questions, feedback, or run into any bugs. And yes, I know the MCT layout isn't ideal, but it's a limitation of the current version of MCT.