Relatedly, I am running the stock Kraxis, and which can get both types of heroes, yet I seem to only get Empire offered to me.  I may be wrong, and after only three heroes being offered in one game, could be statistical anomoly, but it should be checked into.

I was thinking the same thing today.

I'm at my 4th hero and I've still only been offered Kingdom heroes with my custom character.  If I'm getting a hero every time I get fame anyway, what do I care which faction they are from?  It's not as if I'm playing kingdom and just banking on getting a character that has death magic...

Betrayers should perform a different function. I propose this:

Broken Loyalties is almost good enough by itself. Make it free and limit the total number of stolen units you may have at a time. The unit would be tagged and a hard cap would be applied to the number of units tagged you may own. Maybe Kraxis (and every faction for that matter) can have its own perk tree. Kraxis perk tree would raise the cap, +1 armies, +2 armies, +4 armies.

 The faction perk tree would be tied to the faction ability (Adventurer, Betrayers, etc.)

Giving each faction a special perk tree for the sovereign only would also add a nice moddable feature which we would all enjoy using.

Doesn't need to be a "tree" neccessarily, but one or two special abilties that are only available if you have a certain faction trait would be neat.  For example the Warrior Caste faction trait might add a unique attack type to the the Warrior path tree.

That'd be cool.

Broken Loyalties costs 1000 gold to cast now instead of 500 influence, which IMO makes it much better, because I've never had 500 influence in a game before, but I can get gold.  I'm currently playing a game with it, but I'm still early-game, so I don't know how it's going to work out.  I've tailored my faction and sovereign to generate money.  Right now I'm still building the foundation, but when the time comes, I should be able to generate a lot of money and just start buying up cities.

I think something might be broken in the Broken Loyalties code.

I had a game where I literally just met the Kraxis during the AI turn, they declared war on me and used the spell to take my capital away from me (also my only city due to the vast wasteland of desert/swamp around me) - all on their turn.

There were no units or anything around my city.  I'm reasonably sure that my scout found them, rather than they found my city.  so this begs the question of 'do they actually know where my city was', or did they get a map cheat somehow?