Shift in Priorities. I have TL, but stopped at end of war. Wiking has his TL. Sure some others but don't jump to min.
Now if we are getting to what makes A-H survive, we have to look at what broke it. The had a disaster in Galicia in 1914 (Wiking Conrad turns East is example of fixing), Italy entered war in 1915, disaster in Galicia in 1916, and followed by food crisis in late 1918. It took all of these items to break the empire. You can write a CP TL with all of these events, and then A-H is doomed to fail. Go to the other end with Wiking's idea, and it is almost certain to survive. The key is Germany did not want to annex Austria, so Germany wants Austria-Hungary to survive. So unless Germany is almost exhausted, it will prevent immediate breakup after the war. By force if necessary. I looked at this a lot for my TL, and concluded with a stronger German win, it is very, very likely A-H muddles on. All it took was stationing enough German divisions in Hungary (hint, they are there anyway IOTL) to "persuade" the Hungarian nobles they can't win a civil war. And then you get another 50 year compromise. And it is the German pattern. IOTL, they intentionally put units in Slovenia and Croatia that were not needed militarily as a symbol of which side Germany would come down on. Small units have big impact when backup by worlds best Army. Same idea as USA troops in Korea. Now to what is needed for each POD.
- Better 1914 is either better prewar army or 2nd Army goes east. Also lots of German improvement POD that can help such as Germany funds 9th Army in prewar years. Also plenty of Tsar messes up POD. Think anything that harms mobilization schedule.
- Italy not entering. Either really good CP diplomacy or better battlefield for CP. A lot of the previous POD tend to fix this one too.
- 1916 The success in this year was basically massive stupidity by Conrad. You need to replace him, basically.
- Food 1918. Easy - Romania 1 million tons of cereals. Keep Romania neutral. Fixing any of the other POD probably fixes this. And there are other possible POD here. The way the events tend to chain makes it easy to save A-H in some form.