Well a couple of friends of mine are interested in purchasing the game. They're waiting to see how low it goes with steam sales at the moment. But once they've bought it there are a couple of mods I REALLY suggest them to take:

• Home region bonus movement. Just to reduce the absolutely infuriating mechanic of the AI knowing exactly where every army of the player is at any moment and knowing exactly what to do to stay just out of touch of the player.
• No agent spam: You can choose the mod that lessens the impact of agents but personally I just suggested the removal of agents to my friends. I feel like agents are way to strong at the moment so they're very annoying to play against, and they're very tedious to manage so no agents (except when embedded in armies) is perfect for me.
• Later Chaos invasion. When I heard about the worldmap and how it would function I imagined the scenario to be more epic. I imagined how you would first struggle to unite your own faction (Dwarfs, Humans, Vampires, Orcs) by using diplomacy or your military and then once big empires are created you would have to defend versus Chaos, which would field amazing armies that could crush you even if you outnumbered them. In reality it turned out to be rather 'meh'. Later Chaos invasion coupled with better Chaos armies makes it more like I described.
• If you're completely new to the series I'd suggest the "No public order effects from difficulties" mod. I suggest you play at Hard/Very Hard otherwise there is no challenge, but the public order effects you get are just dumb and can be kinda tricky to manage on your first playthough. This mod just removes the public order effects from the difficulty you choose.