Improving Skyrim / Recommended Mods thread (Mostly about Requiem)

[hell bovine]

Mages are DEADLY, don't even dream fighting them without a way to hit them at long distance (archery isn't that good against them as they aren't going to stay on the same place and arrows have a pretty limited range and shitty accuracy in comparison to spells) or having BIG resistances to magic/elements (no, 50% won't be enough. Without resistance to magic, vampires are going to drain you dry if you get closer to them.)

For vampires you only need some sort of rigidity enchantment, the one that states that it protects form health drain, I think. The main problem enemy mages have is limited spell selection, and ice mages get the short end of stick when trolls or undead happen to be nearby.

 

[DeepOcean]

The Companions stuff is problematic. The game treats their content as low to mid level but we're talking about lycanthropes here. So I imagine the mod decided to balance them with lycanthropy in mind rather than when you can do their content. This means that since you can become a werewolf pretty early, the huge benefits you get make the game a lot easier.

I didn't tried werewolf yet but that is my objective, I hope it isn't an I win button.

 

[Lancehead]

Well, it's not quite that. You get disease immunity and +100 to Health and Stamina that stay in effect in human form also, but the attribute bonuses don't contribute to derived stats.

 

[mastroego]

It's not about the SkyRe scaling.
I want to play the unarmed monk builds with its perk trees.
How do you make that work together?
I really hate the vanilla perk tree, they're bland and uninteresting.

Sorry then, I can't be much help. SkyRE experts will know more.
I myself use a mix of Perk Trees from ACE, Stealth Skills Rebalanced and Treebalance. I'm still not entirely sure if I should do something about Mage trees too (Empowered Magic?) and drop Apocalypse Spell Package altogether.

I really liked how Requiem makes you an incompetent loser at the beginning and you have to fight a lot to get what you get by default in Vanilla.The only thing I didn't liked all that much is that Requiem buffed quest related companions like Farkas to ludicrous levels, I completed Dustman Cairn with level 4 and it was just an exercise of watching Farkas kicking asses.

Interesting: without Requiem but with ASIS Encounter Zones I experienced exactly the opposite.
I must have been lvl 8 or something myself; Farkas was constantly in a recovering state: an ax swing or two did him. It was a hard quest to complete, especially the last room (that was hell)

 

[DeepOcean]

Interesting: without Requiem but with ASIS Encounter Zones I experienced exactly the opposite.
I must have been lvl 8 or something myself; Farkas was constantly in a recovering state: an ax swing or two did him. It was a hard quest to complete, especially the last room (that was hell)

The last room in there was a hell as well but I felt I was kinda unecessary, there were times where Farkas was surrounded by 4 Draugrs and killed all of them pratically alone. I obviously exploited the situation to get a few levels of one handed and block by hiding behind my shield and attacking the backs on the Draugrs.

 

[RK47]

Farkas is heavy armor grandmaster after all.

 

[Akratus]

Yeah, he can teach you how to wear things like a pro.

 

[circ]

Wat? Forums are disabled atm.

Yeah they took a hit, temp. page here:

http://enbdev.com/ctdfix.html


Basically, Skyrim was assigning its required memory in 256 MB blocks, which was the root cause for loads of issues. Just by upping it to 512 MB (and there's nothing stopping you from increasing it further, they're still testing it) people have been playing saves that were previously CTD'ing all the time, increased ugrids etc. and still have a completely stable game. It could end up being a real game changer for Skyrim modding (and hopefully other Lolbryo games too). You could have all those 4K texture mods, Open Cities and NPC-adding mods all working together without Skyrim crapping itself.

You can find the pre-compiled DLL from these threads, for example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1vl4rv/major_breakthrough_in_skyrim_modding_300_units/
http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/1vjcuw/ctdfreeze_memory_fixes_this_guy_pretty_much/

Finally got around to testing this thing and um. Shit.

I don't mess with vanilla ugrid loads but I do run some heavy script usage mods.

So tested with Frostfall - which I got a few days ago for the first time, fun but laggy scripts to the point I had to make changes to papyrus. Better Vampires. Convenient Horses. Threw in Wet and Cold too - although Get Snowy took care of snow shader and Frostfall handled wet effects.

Crashed after about 2 minutes of speedmult jujumagumbo.

Tried again, removing Wet and Cold - although the breath effect is so goddamn SEXY. Got bored after 13 minutes. BECAUSE IT JUST. WON'T. CRASH. DAMN YOU.

And dll is like 50 lines of code.

What the fuck Bethesda. What the fuck.

 

[Turisas]

Wot's a DLL?

Spoiler

I know Pete isn't a dev, but he just makes the funniest low int faces.

 

[Brinko]

So have the SKSE people said they are working to add in this increase in memory blocks to their .dll's? Or is everyone going to have to manually add this themselves or trust some nutjob off of LoversLab to give out good code?

 

[circ]

Ok trying out Smart Cast mod and I'm getting noticeable script lag, atleast on horseback - which I assume is Convenient Horses running its scripts. I'd hate to try playing my vampire on horseback. I guess I'm stuck using hotkeys for everything instead, and Smart Cast can't handle dual casting anyway apparently.

Anything similar without scripts, that maybe adds spells to hotkey combos and allows multi-key presses like for example CTRL+A or something. SkyUI's hotkey assignment does make mage-ry less annoying but there's always room for a lot of improvement.

Also on the note of scripts. I was planning to add a Needs mod. There seem to be 3 popular ones: Realistic Needs, Total Realism and Imps more Complex Needs. Anyone have any experience with those?

Hoping for the following criteria: minimal scripting - none would be noice, includes vampires having to suck blood; and not really necessary but I don't care for a million extra recipes.

Oh yeah. Loverslab also has a Needs mod: Private Needs. Having to take a shit and draining the lizard now and then. How's that?

 

[Commissar Draco]

Game runs smoother now and saves are no longer corrupting but game can still CTD while leaving zones but less often but before... but Commmissar Comp is low on Memor so it is not big surprise; you have to have atleast 8 GBs for this mod to do his magic.

 

[mastroego]

Also on the note of scripts. I was planning to add a Needs mod. There seem to be 3 popular ones: Realistic Needs, Total Realism and Imps more Complex Needs. Anyone have any experience with those?
Hoping for the following criteria: minimal scripting - none would be noice, includes vampires having to suck blood; and not really necessary but I don't care for a million extra recipes.

I tried a few and settled with Realistic Needs. It adds realism without getting OVERLY tedious (of course you can refine the settings to your liking). Also it's up to date and it's perfectly compatible with everything else I use.
So now I have to be mindful of the food and rest problem, dedicate precious space for it in my backpack (I have mods that greatly limit that), without the issue becoming dominant over the actual game.

 

[you know what time it is]

I wonder if it'll fold before another TES even comes up. Though bethesda is a bit busy raping Fallout right now, so they might have a chance.

 

[Turisas]

Ok trying out Smart Cast mod and I'm getting noticeable script lag, atleast on horseback - which I assume is Convenient Horses running its scripts. I'd hate to try playing my vampire on horseback. I guess I'm stuck using hotkeys for everything instead, and Smart Cast can't handle dual casting anyway apparently.

What are you using to measure the script lag? Convenient Horses had that nifty feature to test it, but I disabled it since I'm trying to get rid of all the non-essential script-heavy mods.

 

[circ]

Memory I guess. If it takes longer than usual to open UI objects with scripts running, something's not right.

Oh and speaking of scripts... NSFW unless you work in a tranny bar.

Spoiler

Maybe I was hoping for more. But what a pointless mod.

 

[circ]

Also on the note of scripts. I was planning to add a Needs mod. There seem to be 3 popular ones: Realistic Needs, Total Realism and Imps more Complex Needs. Anyone have any experience with those?
Hoping for the following criteria: minimal scripting - none would be noice, includes vampires having to suck blood; and not really necessary but I don't care for a million extra recipes.

I tried a few and settled with Realistic Needs. It adds realism without getting OVERLY tedious (of course you can refine the settings to your liking). Also it's up to date and it's perfectly compatible with everything else I use.
So now I have to be mindful of the food and rest problem, dedicate precious space for it in my backpack (I have mods that greatly limit that), without the issue becoming dominant over the actual game.

Been testing RND for about 20 minutes now. Got some disease by drinking from a pool of water outside Whiterun. Sounds legit. But eh, some SkyUI meters would have been nice. Also, waterskins added to your Frostfall pack is sweet. Seems like there's a shitload of stuff though, looking at the description on nexus. Gathering salt through sea water. Lul. Script lag doesn't seem too severe, can't notice any yet, although MCM took its time to register the RND menu.

I dunno. How's Total Realism - Basic Needs? Anyone tried that? I'd hate to lose the waterskin from RND though, and the recipes are pretty nice + gathering even moar loot and having a use for empty bottles is pretty sweet.

EDIT: ok just slept 8 hours or so. And I'm hungry, okie dok. But I'm not fully satiated from two servings of soup? The fuck? Must be some tiny ass servings. And also, I read about how amazing it was that it had eating and drinking animations and so on, but when I'm eating soup, I drink it from an ale mug. Seriously? Taking out a piece of bread when eating a carrot? You couldn't just recycle a yawn animation or bring the hand to the face? Wut? Ok gonna try out TRO - though it hasn't been updated in almost 2 years and Imps - not updated in a good while either.

 

[CyberWhale]

In other news, Skyrim sells 20 million copies.

 

[circ]

Probably thanks to mods. And yet, it uses archaic tech and doesn't even want to be modded. Make sense Bethesda.

 

[Akratus]

Nah, it's thanks to the marketing budget and the HYPE MACHINE©.

 

[hell bovine]

That's because it is the equivalent of fast-food; everyone knows it's made of garbage and shouldn't be even called food, but that doesn't stop anyone from eating it.

 

[Lancehead]

Marketing only helps sell in the beginning. Modding scene is what helps keep a steady player base that plays the game for years to come. Bethesda are not shortsighted like many other AAA publishers. Not to mention it also lets them get away with half-baked implementations in their games.

 

[mastroego]

Marketing only helps sell in the beginning. Modding scene is what helps keep a steady player base that plays the game for years to come. Bethesda are not shortsighted like many other AAA publishers. Not to mention it also lets them get away with half-baked implementations in their games.

This, exactly.
Games that truly sucked sold poorly despite the hype (Dragon Age 2?).
Skyrim is not that bad to begin with: I tried Daggerfall (back in the day) and Oblivion more recently, and HATED them.
But for Skyrim I stayed. With highs and lows, for sure, but it remained installed.

And now, after 2+ years, mods are so good and refined that my version of Skyrim is providing one of the most visceral and "realistic" leveling-up experiences I've ever had with a crpg. Honestly.
(not to mention the recent miracle memory hack, that solved 3/4 of anyone's crashes).
Bethesda has had the good sense to let modders do WHATEVER, completely unmolested.
The engine is poor, but other than that, Bethesda doesn't get in the way.
And it paid off for them. Just consider for a moment EA's modding "policies", and you'll see what I mean.

 

[DraQ]

Well, it's not quite that. You get disease immunity and +100 to Health and Stamina that stay in effect in human form also, but the attribute bonuses don't contribute to derived stats.

Bonuses are quite hefty, but they still won't prevent you from dying if you get on the wrong end on whatever, transformation is lengthy and the enemies aren't exactly gentlemanly about letting you finish, and the werewolf form, while powerful is also quite limited and far from invulnerable.

Games that truly sucked sold poorly despite the hype (Dragon Age 2?).

Oblivion.

 

[Turisas]

So new Apocalypse Spell Package comes out... 2 days after I start playing. And no support for updating, great.