Played my first game as dwarfs, playing Grimnir Ironfistaxebeard because screw playing as someone who can't get off their chair.
Things went fairly well at first, then massive debt and a slew of grudges. I was keeping my head above water barely, helping my dwarfport neighbour fend off Grimgor's waaagh.
Friend wanted to play co-op, I was like "sweet!".
A half-hour of soft-freezes later, and I'm in. We wanted to play vampire counts together, but unfortunately the game doesn't go for that. So, bearing in mind various corruption mechanics which would've made playing co-op downright awful, he went empire, and I went dwarfs again, this time with chairman.
Complete turnaround. The fellow clans were standoffish yet hyperconpetent, I managed to snag the city of brightgold to the north-east, and still return in a timely manner, and the early access to siege weapons meant that within 20 turns I had bitchslapped grimgor out of his big boots and taken almost every Orc city south of me whilst paying off a cool 3000 to my empire ally every turn for shiggles, because we were so far apart it was essentially the only help I could give.
Unsure if it's an unbalance of the legendary leaders or just blind luck, as the difficulty was the exact same both times.
But yes, would very much like to play co-op as two seperate roving hordes of chaos.
(Some IP's may be slightly different in the above novella because despite playing for 12 hours the names of most people simply haven't sunk in.)