I think your Cthulhu Wars experience reflects the faction balance. Opener can be good IF the player pulls off their one super turn exactly right, and the most experienced player at the table played him and managed it. If the player messes up that super turn, or god forbid you hand him to a new player, he’s going to come in last. Crawling Chaos is the overall best base game faction (my only niggle with base game is that Crawling Chaos could use a minor nerf and Cthulhu a minor buff), and the 2nd most experienced player came in 2nd with him. Everyone else was a first time player and Windwalker came in 3rd, behind the only two people who had played before. I’d wager that with one more game, that player could come in 1st with Windwalker. It’s stupid how many advantages that faction gets with no drawbacks (the same combat strength as Cthulhu, the same combat flexibility as Crawling Chaos, some of the easiest spellbooks in the game to get). Personally, I would never include a tricky faction like Opener in a newbie game (newbies have no chance of playing him effectively, and nobody can expect and defend against his super turn if they never seen him in action before), and if there were 2 experienced players on the table with a bunch of first timers, I definitely wouldn’t give Crawling Chaos to one of the experienced guys.
Sounds like you’re talking base game Chaos in the Old World? In the expansion, no one wins by dial. Like, ever. I was part of an online community about 5 years ago that played over a hundred CitOW games, all by very experienced people. I saw a ton of plays, but interest in the game died out when eventually everyone admitted each game played out the same way with the same balance issues.
Base game, only Khorne or Slaneesh are going to realistically win by dial, and even then you only get to play with more than 2 upgrades for a turn or two. Nurgle is mostly stuck with 1, Tzeentch might get 2 by the very end. It would be less of an issue if the upgrades were flexible based on the board development, but you want the same upgrades in the same order every single game. Everyone wants the cultist upgrade first, no exceptions.
From there the games always played out in the same way. Khorne would win by dial if the other players were inexperienced and let him. Nurgle would win if everyone interfered with each other enough to delay victories. Tzeentch would win with cultist warpstone bombs if he drew the right cards. If none of those conditions were met, Slaneesh would win by dial advancement because nobody ever bothered attacking his 2 defense cultists and he just passively sat there as a non-entity.
(There was one exception with an alternate Khorne strat that someone discovered was very effective. He could actually win by VP and dominating regions rather than killing pieces for dial advancement. You take his Bloodthirster upgrade first (Bloodthirster counts as 3 figures for domination) and use that to dominate regions and keep others out. There were some other details I forget but it was an almost unstoppable strat in the right hands).
The expansion partially fixed the upgrade issue, to having 2 or 3 viable upgrades per factions instead of mandatory cultist ones. Everyone now had to win by VP since dial was almost impossible. Tzeentch got some new super card and was now the most powerful faction but even more dependent on drawing the right cards. Slaneesh lost the 2 defense cultists which was a good thing but got no new buffs to make up for it and became by far the weakest faction.
I vaguely remember the world event cards, except that they were mostly inconsequential, except for one or two that disproportionately screwed over a specific god. If they came up at the wrong time, that god was unfairly screwed by unpredictable randomness.
