My advice for reaching endgame toys is to just cheat. Cheat engine trivially edits the resource amounts, and you can go wild from there
Alternative is to just make sure you don't have any factions in play with apocalypse mechanics. Pretty sure there's also some mod or another that adds an inactive faction that's really hard to kill, too, so you can keep playing after everything else has died. You got options, heh.
At this point, i wonder if it is worth the trouble at all. I feel like even Dominions 5 SP was more fun than CoE, at least before AI being actively suicidal started driving me to ragequit, and before i played Dominions 5 MP non-stop for 2 years. Though most fun was from finding what ridicolous stuff you can do. Mods help with that a lot, i remember two best SP games were with Aurum and Hollowmoor from Confluence, was really fun to discover their gimmicks. Might try Populum for CoE, it looks like it goes in that direction.
I'm pretty sure only Voice of El can cause apocalyptic scenario, and other 5 or so are RNJesus screwing you over trough particular neutrals, so disbling him won't help much. Was pretty dissapointed by that once. Thought i will be opening gate to primal world with Dryad Queen, but all i got was Ya all's mama.
At least i found a really entertaining stream. GeneralConfusion's
release stream with kobolds is !FUN! from beginning to an end.
This one was mostly boring conquering and ghostbusting, but 3:31 is pure gold.
Restarted with Voice of El. They really upgraded apocalyptic riders' sprites a lot.
Unfortunately, he came for my castle first. Fortunately, he immediately got killed by 7 catapults. Unfortunately, i then accidentally teleported my entire army to wonderful location in hell with a scroll, and the save was entirely too long ago.
Ah, screw that.