Well from what you said I'd prefer Enemy Expansion for sure... It's just that I was interested in adding the "unleveled" element. But perhaps it isn't as noticeable in Daggerfall...
I think I'll also add SIGIL and Warm Ashes after all.
Do you happen to know Unleveled Loot, Unleveled Spells and Better Archery?
I certainly concur with the points made by
SharkClub and whole heartedly recommend Enemy Expansion, I don't know have any experience with unlevelled mods so I couldn't comment on the experience the way they did, but I agree that Daggerfall is significantly difficult as it is and without meta knowledge will result in many, many deaths and dead end progressions.
The thing about the Ebony Dagger is absolutely true and I think I mentioned it earlier too; always take that option when presented with it during character creation because there are a minimum of one though most people will encounter at least two magical imps that need to be defeated in the opening dungeon unless you plan on just running straight to the exit without stopping. The first one comes very early on, just beyond the second flight of stairs after you turn to leave the little chamber where your first encounter (a rat) is, immediately to the left behind a closed door. There is a bat patrolling this corner that will usually come at you while you are still ascending the steps and sometimes you can just walk right past that door without opening it and encountering the imp, but sometimes it will open the door itself and come after you!
Then there is another one right at the very end, in the final room where the exit door is, fighting two bats or maybe a rat; again you can just dash past it making straight for the exit door and if you have the options on for enemies to engage each other in combat then usually the imp will be preoccupied focusing on fighting a bat and not take notice of you, but if you intend to fight your way out and collect gold and equipment to gear up then you will need a reliable method of damaging the imps and the only options available are if you take that Ebony dagger, are a spellcaster and use a Destruction magic (which I think requires having it as a major skill to start with such a spell, but I could be mistaken about that), or get unusually lucky with a weapon drop of Steel quality or greater.
About SIGIL and Warm Ashes, they are both seriously great mods, but yea like I was saying just make sure you say "no" when the very first Warm Ashes activation prompt comes up for the wilderness. They are compatible as far as I'm aware, and there shouldn't be any conflict if you were to activate both, I just think you would then be bombarded with an obscene amount of very difficult random encounters lol. When I was using Warm Ashes alone as the only mod that added enemy encounters to the wilderness I was finding it just a bit too frequent for me and I kept being assaulted by very difficult enemies like vampires, or like multiple bears simultaneously, at level 1 just out of the opening dungeon! According to the most recent update for Warm Ashes though, the mod author said "Reduce wilderness encounters to one encounter per wilderness visit" so it must be significantly toned down, but I prefer still just to keep all of the other options activated and leave the wilderness encounters to SIGIL. The thing about SIGIL is that it has a variety of encounter types and not all of them are hostile enemies, like you can encounter traveling merchants or NPCs who can train your skills, you can encounter like actual battles going down between two different groups, and all of it is context aware so it takes into account the weather and time of day. The most recent version requires Enemy Expansion, but I think that is excellent because it now also incorporates the new enemy types into its encounter system.
So yea my personal recommendation would be similar to the one above, to use Enemy Expansion and not use the unlevelled enemies or combat overhaul, but that's just my preferences and I don't want to try to dissuade you from pursuing a gameplay style that you find more interesting. I just think the vanilla combat mechanics with the fixes that Daggerfall Unity already comes with is best left as it is because altering it will upset the balance and it is already a very challenging game. Unfortunately though I have not tried the three mods you are interested in, Unleveled Loot, Unleveled Spells and Better Archery. I don't think I have even seen Better Archery actually, is it a newer mod perhaps? I do use the archery-related options in the Enhancement tab on the Launcher, such as "Bows - Draw and Release" and "Equip Bows in Left Hand Only", and with Diverse Weapons the archery experience becomes perfect for me. As for Unleveled Spells, I've never used it, but I do use (and I think I included it in my recommended mod list) Kab's Unleveled Spells which has been updated much more recently and to me seems to be much more efficient and well conceived:
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/220
As far as Unleveled Loot the reason I don't use such a mod is really just because of the degree to which I still maintain a relative adherence to the vanilla mechanics. One of the best parts of the game for me is the thrill of finding an end-game material weapon type after going through all the different tiered materials as you level up and progress through the game. I feel it would rob the player of that satisfactory sense of accomplishment and reward to just have access to Ebony, Daedric, Adamantium, Orcish &c weapons and armor potentially even right away. But if you don't suspect you will be spending too much time with the game I suppose it could be used if you want to experience high powered stuff sooner than later.
Also I took some screenshots last night that I wanted to share how my game looks with my mods. I barely played more than a few minutes and most of the time was spent on building the character (a custom class High Elf focused on magic and archery, usually I play as a Nord though) and these screenshots are at the approach to Gothway Garden, the closest town due south to the point you begin the game immediately after exiting the opening dungeon. I have the draw distance in the launcher set to 3 and turned off the "enable improved terrain" option in Distant Terrain in order to let Mountains and Hills work with the games heightmaps that Daggerfall Unity implements. My hand and weapons when drawn are unfortunately partially obscured by the compass, but this can be changed by altering the display settings and not using retro rendering mode. I spent most of my time last night trying to get Battlespire to work properly; I just could not figure out how to get it to run well with the "high resolution" option turned on in-game. At low resolution it would run flawlessly but at high I was getting like 5 FPS lol; eventually I resolved the issue and got it working decently enough, but I then was too tired to play Daggerfall for long, so after updating my mods (I added the Detailed City Walls mod and the HUD Torch mod while deleting the three potentially harmful mods discussed here yesterday) I created my new character, got through the dungeon, and made it to an inn in Gothway Garden before going to bed.
I took these few screenshots to just give a general impression what my game looks like; you can see the crosshair mod, the hotkey mod, the distant terrain and heightmap variety with Mountains and Hills, the Wilderness Overhaul adding a million trees while keeping the areas immediately surrounding towns clear (you can actually adjust how far from towns you want the clearing space to be, and you can select from hundreds of seeds to generate the wilderness variety, its so cool). Also visible are the NPCs such as the Dunmer woman, the guy on a horse, and a guard on a horse in the background, the sprites of the NPCs in the dialogue mode (I maintain vanilla for this, and I don't use the launchers font either, it clashes too much for me with the rest of the graphics), the different weapon types in Diverse Weapons (one is the Iron Saber and the other is the Ebony Dagger), and of course a whole bunch of others that are either more subtle or just not visible on the screen. I can take better screenshots later if anyone is interested, to show more of the terrain (like how the implemented heightmaps makes it so that going south to Gothway Garden has you ascending a massive incline, which is immediately behind my characters point of view in those screenshots) and the wilderness, the roads and occupied exterior dungeons, and so on.
And, you know I just had to include a Battlespire screenshot, because my character got the most pimped out cloak at the start and she's jamming on some serious shit, clapping daedra in style.
EDIT - You can also see what I was talking about with the skybox; I no longer use any skybox mods because even if it can look ridiculous like the giant trees background, I love the vanilla landscape backdrops too much to replace them with a modern style sky. So to some people it might look ridiculous, but to me it is perfect.
