Storm of Chaos

This mod adds four playable Chaos factions; the Blades of Khorne, Children of Nurgle, Scions of Slaanesh, and the Talons of Tzeentch, enabling cooperative Chaos play while offering different start positions and playstyles for Chaos, and making the default experience a little less repetitive. All four factions are playable in both Mortal Empires and Vortex campaigns! Some features;

• The Blades of Khorne cannot access Sorcerer lords or heroes other than a very limited cap of Shaman-Sorcerers, but have more army-buffing skills on their lords than most, and many lords have multiple unique active abilities that can be used to affect the flow of battle. Egil Styrbjorn is an incredibly powerful but slow duelist who buffs a variety of marauders and chaos units, Scyla Anfingrim is a monstrous Chaos Spawn with potent Marauder melee and ranged buffs, Atropos the Dreadlord brought a small contingent of elite Dark Elf units, and the rogue strategist Gaius van Baelsar brings a variety of Empire artillery and cavalry!
• The Children of Nurgle offer a variety of plague-focused lords and can infest their lords with permanent plagues. Lord Blistrox can curry favor with the four Great Clans to bring them under his influence, Skoroth the Scourge can evolve and customize Plagueborn and Aberrations with mutually exclusive upgrades, Valnir the Reaper can infect himself, his army, and his foes with a variety of devastating plagues, and Kharan the Blighted is a siege specialist who can build extra siege towers and cripple enemy defensive towers. They also come with a custom Lore of Nurgle!
• The Talons of Tzeentch are heavily magic focused. Most lords are able to dominate battlefields with their powerful and unique magic, or counter enemy casters. Sarthorael can access 4 different lores (including Light!) with a number of custom spells, Saenathra is a massive Arachnarok spider that consumes magic and buffs spiders, Prometheus the giant can access Life magic and buff trolls/giants, and Balor buffs Fimir and marauders. Also comes with a full custom Lore of Tzeentch!
• Sigvald is a hoe. Proper Slaanesh faction eventually(tm).

• 12 new legendary lords, each with a full suite of unique items and army buffing skills to incentivize various playstyles! Some focus entirely on Chaos units, while others allow you to build limited numbers of units from other factions based on their backstory; no two will play alike!
• Most lords buff specific groups of units significantly and have high level skill upgrades to make them more viable into mid-lategame – whether it be Plague Monk Censer Bearers with bound spells for Blistrox or Prometheus getting different buffs and active abilities for most types of giants, they may not be as tough and efficient as Chosen but offer very different playstyles.
• Vanilla Warriors of Chaos lords were also improved to varying degrees; Sigvald is now a nimble and deadly AP-focused melee duelist, highly resistant to knockback, with a much stronger focus on Marauder play and a special skill that significantly buffs the Mirror Guard. Arachaon gets slightly improved army buffs, a special skill buffing the Swords of Chaos, and a Chaos Dragon mount inspired by (yeah yeah) AoS Dorghar. Kholek is unchanged ‘cuz he’s already god.
• Egil also starts with his daughters from lore as unique Legendary Heroes, Hrefna and Fraygerd. Fast but fragile duelists with different specialties, each can unlock various short-duration army buffs to reward a little extra micro and speed up their slower father.

• Chosen now have immunity to psychology, Manticores got a bonus versus large, unarmored trolls now move a little faster and have better MD, and Aspiring Champions are now significantly scarier. Tried to keep the vanilla unit changes minimal but felt like a few underperforming units could use some love. Chosen weren’t really underperforming, but dangit, they shouldn’t terror rout!
• Chaos blue line skills improved significantly to rival game 2 lords; weaker skills now have additional or stronger effects, Replenishment added to several skills to add up to the 20% available to most game 2 lords.
• Horde main buildings now grant additional growth/chaos corruption; the main line research now gives slight factionwide growth bonuses as well. Encamp now costs 0 movement a la Vampire Coast lords and gives a boost to growth. Overall it shouldn’t be VC level crazy fast growth, but a lot less waiting around than vanilla.
• Additional building population cost halved; to balance this out, the cost of high level buildings increased, in some cases significantly, especially the main settlement line. The idea is that you shouldn’t be punished as much for going wide, but the new growth sources shouldn’t give you tier 5 everything super fast.

• Plenty of new units to add versatility beyond just rushing Chosen; tier 5 Manticores, significantly expanded Marauder line, Chaos Dragons, Gorebeasts, Chosen Berserkers, Marauder Huskarls, Fimir, Pink Horrors, angry spiders, and more! Some are limited in number for balance purposes. Some have special mechanics; forest spiders are lightning fast skirmishers that can climb walls!
• Three new sets of buildings to customize your horde! Further increase horde replenishment, movement range, XP/turn, and other utility with horde support buildings; or unlock and upgrade 8 new army abilities to suck your foes into the Warp, conjure massive chaos firestorms, or grant increasingly powerful Marks of each Chaos God to individual units for the duration of a battle!
• Additionally, many lords have access to 1-3 custom buildings which are typically how they access limited units, may allow access to existing units at a lower tier than normal, and sometimes offer additional buffs.

Many new magic spells across various lores, to help each legendary lord feel extra unique! Arnzipal’s Black Horror is now a proper spell in the Dark lore, while Noctilus’s Wraithstorm is now a Shadow magic spell. But that’s not all; other lore-inspired spells from the Lores of Metal, Fire, and even Light exist! Because what’s a Tzeentchian army without a bit of rules lawyering, anyways? Lore of Nurgle and Tzeentch are in as well too!

This is a startpos mod, which means it won’t play nice with any other startpos mods – faction unlockers in particular. So no Crynsos Faction Unlocker or Mixu’s new unlocker.

Playable with SFO/Radious/etc, but balance may not be perfect.

Note that this mod is absolutely playable without it, but Norsca DLC adds many lower tier Norscan units to the roster to flesh things out and is highly recommended.

• Due to the only Giant overworld animation being an unmoving boss, Prometheus moonwalks across the campaign map instead of walking like a mere mortal. He still works fine in battle.
• Similarly, Scyla Anfingrim is a t-posing elf on campaign map. Sorry guys. CA is racist against Chaos Spawn.
• Gorebeasts will occasionally moonwalk backwards after a charge. Just part of them being animated as a chariot mount, not much I can do about it.

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Much of the knowledge that helped me make this mod came from the good folks over at the C&C Modding Den, a Discord server where many community figures congregate. Great place to learn from more experienced modders or just vent about what’s going wrong with your Nude Malekith mod. I highly recommend it! …The server, not the Malekith thing. https://discord.gg/VwygWKB