With many excellent mods out there surrounding melee/archery and as was brought up in recent discussion, magic, overhauls, it is incredibly likely that an enthusiastic but serious player would create an unbalanced game.

Because I am concerned about balance, it would be nice to hear from the community about which combinations provide the best balance.

Overall
Phitt's Damage Multiplier or Level Based Health

Combat:
Deadly Reflex 6
Unnecessary Violence 2
FCOM Damage and Durability
Spears of Cyrodiil
Unarmored Skill for Everyone (not sure what happened to this, can't find it anymore)
BFG's Enhanced Armory Realism
Hand-to-Hand specifically
Kayo, Raging Fists, UN2

Archery:
Combat Archery (this does seem to be uber. I must tread carefully)
Double Arrow Nock Shot
Actors Can Miss Now
FCOM Archery
Crossbows of Cyrodiil
Marksman Challenge

Magic:
L.A.M.E.
Conduit Magic
Supreme Magicka
Fearsome Magicka
Audacious Magery
Magic Overlap (didn't know this could be abused, actually. In any case, it looks like none of the other magic mods deal with this.)
Enhanced Enchantment (this looks a little uber)
Weaker Resist Magic (only a resource atm)
Alternative Oblivion Magic System (overhauls the way spells are learned)
Duke Patrick's Combat Magic (adds new spells, most importantly gets rid of all reflect magicka spells)
Advanced Magecraft (more control over magic effects, might be uber in this regard..)
Moriarcis and/or Mannimarco Resurrection (both add powerful magic spells. Nothing uber, as far as I can tell, playtest is a must)

Alchemy specifically
Alchemy Advanced, UN2,


Other or Negligible:
for nerfing sneak attacks
Near Miss (Magic & Arrows) Alert Target
Fresh Kills Alert NPC
Less Overpowered Night Eye
for recruiting help
SHOUT
Companion Share and Recruit?
for balancing races
Race Rebalancing Project
Appler's Passive Birthsigns
Enemy Actors Use Powers

SM Combat Hide
Phitt's Phighting Phixes
AV Uncapper

1
a. Can't really unbalance
b. ^
c. Never heard of it :shrug:
d. I'd reccomend DR's Timed Block Plus x% increased damage

2
a. This will make bows really strong, so be careful with it
b. Skill based, so I can't seeing it being a problem
c. They don't miss that much, but it feels better
d. :shrug:

3.
a. I like it, makes support spells a little stronger than attack ones
b. See 2b
c. Supreme Doesn't add to many spells, and most are a little strong for LAME
c(2). Fearsome is good, but I broke it
d. :shrug:
e. :shrug:

4.
a. Makes it a lot better
b. Your call, they change things, but it doesn't unbalance anything

Overall: :thumbsup:

I struck both FCOM tinkers from the list, the first per your suggestion, Eldude95, and the second because, as I was reading over Combat Archery, the readme reveals you can adjust archery damage numbers with it.

Kayo is a simple mod simply allowing hand-to-hand combat to knock opponents out before killing them. I'm going to use it along side fiery fists/raging fists/fists of fury. Haven't decided. XD

For archery, I was also wondering about Marksman Challenge to offset Combat Archery and replace Patrick's Actors Can Miss.

I'd suggest hanging back for the new version of unnecessary violence - the previous version has some bugs which needed addressing. It works okay, but can be a bit annoying. The new one is fairly imminent, so shouldn't delay you long.

1. Get Kuertee's damage modifier mod
2. There is no two

Generally speaking you'll obviously want LAME and/or SM, but those are pretty tame as far as balance goes and not really relevant. The rest of that stuff is pretty silly IMO.

I almost forgot. Will do.



Well, it's not the individual balance of the mods that I am concerned about. More like the combined effects of using mods together. Deadly Reflex and Unnecessary Violence, used together, provide the typical fighter with more variety and powerful moves, making combat significantly more deadly. Magic, already underpowered in vanilla, would be poorly balanced against the DR and UV combo unless the Magic got its own overhaul. In persuit of evening out magic and combat, I've grabbed LAME in the past, but it still seems that magic is somewhat underpowered. But if I were to grab all of those Magic things I mentioned, plus something like Midas Magic, I am sure that Magic would be very overpowered.

So, I'm looking at relationships here. But, point taken, some are silly as far as concerns about balancing go (Kayo for example)

Twice in the past week I've seen someone mention using that! By far my simplest mod, and pretty old, but I'm glad to see it getting some play.


Didn't know about this one, gonna have to check it out myself...

I will second Lame and SM, with SM overriding. If you want more difficult and balanced (for PC and NPCs) you may want to check out http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31379 mod.


Edit: I am all about keeping the game balanced as well. Only two new weapons mods in my LO are not MOBS or OMOBS balanced. That will have to be fixed...

It is quite useful, especially when I'm running a realistic fatigue mod and I've got some sort of mod providing for magical hand-to-hand combat. Makes hand-to-hand not only useful, but almost overpowered, if I do say so myself.
(and, I'm guessing once I grab UN 2, hand-to-hand will be overpowered.



Will check that out. Thanks.

I'm pretty sure you can use Fearsome Magicka with any of the other magic overhauls. I believe it was made with LAME and SM compatibility in mind anyways.

Do you think having all three might be overdoing it though?

How so? It has a few extra requirements, but it does not seem to be unbalancing. I have not used that mod either, but you may want to try it; however, you can always do that after you get some setup running well first.

Essential for balanced combat, IMO, is the No Running While Using Bows or Spells mod

Without it it's way too easy and cheap and failproof to just run backwards pelting an enemy with arrows, or run in circles spam-healing yourself

Topic: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1085118-relz-no-running-while-using-bows-or-spells/page__p__15837205__fromsearch__1&#entry15837205

Mod: http://www.mediafire.com/?jjzaminjc2m

EDIT: Some mod restricting potion use per battle would also be in order IMO.. though I don't know of any.

My least-noticed mod, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26409, is a mod that can help you balance combat for any setup. It makes the player health dependent on level only (not Endurance), and lets you set exactly how fast you health goes up per level, and max health you can have. That way, if you have a setup that makes yourself over-powered, you can use this mod to reduce your health, without increasing the game difficulty (which has the drawback of making fights last much longer).

The mod is supposed to be compatible with any mod that changes base health (like RBP, RL or nGCD), but I've had one incompatibility report, where the most likely incompatible mod was Oblivion XP.

Yeah I agree with others about the difficulty of assessing what is balanced.

If your using and overhaul then that skews balance and there is always the often overlooked difficulty slider bar.

So what is it about balance that you are worried about - that it will become too easy or too difficult? That would help determine what mods to use.

Myself I prefer mods that effect both the player character and the NPCs - that is what balanced means to me. In that I cannot recommend any and all mods by Duke Patrick enough [edited to include that last word].

Something like this was my first approach trying to make the battles faster and more deadly (I would have used your mod if I had known about it). The problem is if you decrease player health by more than just a few percent you need to adjust a whole lot of other stuff as well or the balance will go out of the window. Fortify health, restore health, absorb health - all that will be overpowered if you try to play the game with 50% health like I did because all these effects will be twice as powerful if used by the player. Drain health will be overpowered as well if used against the player. That is why you'd need to change all vanilla spells with these effects, the magic effect magnitudes and costs themselves, vanilla potions, all vanilla enchantments and all sigil stones using any of these effects. Then it will be balanced if used by the player, but the effects will be underpowered if used by enemies. And you still have the problem that any of these might be added by mods without your changes in mind. If you use magic overhauls, other overhauls like FCOM or Frans/OOO and a ton of other mods it is an almost impossible task to balance things perfectly. It is great if you want to decrease health by just 10% or less, but if you decrease it by a large amount it doesn't work well anymore. At least it didn't work well for me after I found a few fortify health potions that doubled my health and enchanted my weapon with a sigil stone that gave it absorb health for 20% of my total health.

That is why I made my http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31379 mod, which equally increases all damage done to and by the player, no matter what kind of damage it is. I've played with it for several hours now and didn't have any problems. The battles are fast and deadly, the overall game balance isn't touched by it.

Sorry for all the bla bla, but I've tried to increase overall damage in the game since I've started modding a few years ago. It was my Waterloo. I literally tried every approach I could think of and I'm so happy that I finally found a solution that works exactly like I want without any side effects.

the way I do it:

Combat:

FCOM Damage & Durability
Deadly Reflex
Unnecessary Violence

Archery:

FCOM Archery
Actors can miss now

Magic:

Supreme Magicka Update
Less Annoying Magic Experience
Midas Magic - Spells of Aurum

with L.A.M.E. loading after SM, in order to balance out FCOM archery and FCOM damage. imho this is THE way to go, because not using those 2 FCOM modules and loading SM after L.A.M.E. means fights are gonna be way too long. boring. not cool. my way instead, fights are much more compelling as you're only allowed a very strict margin of error. blocking is important. screw up, and a battleaxe swipe WILL take away a huge chunk of your health. also much more realistic imho.

of course, other must have in this setup would be Race Balancing Project, near miss magic and arrows alert NPCs, fresh kills alert NPCs, SM Combat Hide, Syclonix's Help Others Under Threat ( Syclonix, you are very much missed. this mod is awesome. you can call out for help and get it ) , Put it in its place, plus Companion Share and Recruit and Companion Master. then I recommend choosing FCOM Stronger Spawns, as that will mean stronger spawns that will balance out the fact you're running along with mates, and also the added benefit of stressing your CPU less due to less overall spawns ( quality over quantity, basically ) . for magic, I also recommend Alchemy Advanced, Expanded Spellmaking and Enchanting Enhanced, all high quality made by great modders.

2 less known ones I'm particularly fond of are Casting Time ( gets rid of the freakin "casting while blocking is faster" ) and Magick Overlap ( you can't no longer cast chameleon 10 pts 10 times and get 100% chameleon, etc. )

And that is the approach that Duke Patrick took from way back ... except his seems more to be about weapons increasing rather than about overall increase in all directions. The result I've seen from that approach being that humans and other weapon users deal more damage than monsters. He made blocking more important too - way more important. So yeah there are big differences after all.

I think what he did then (and what most other damage increase mods do, like the Deadly Reflex or FCOM damage plus mods) is to increase the fDamageWeaponMult. That setting increases weapon damage. But only weapon damage. So spell effects (including enchantments, poisons etc) and creatures without weapons still deal regular damage, which unbalances the game in my opinion.

I'm pretty sure there are other tweaks to the damage formula as well based on stats and weapon materials. He really focuses on weight and the physics behind combat more thoroughly any other modder I can think of. While the melee mod is redacted the archery mod still shows this quite well. Combined with his other mods that change combat AI makes combat very challenging and it makes for my favorite game to play.

But then that strikes at what exactly is meant by balance. Playing his mods do not feel unbalanced my character can get killed just as fast as he can kill, and that is what balance means to me. To me a weapon wielding human like character with intelligence should be far more dangerous than even a knuckle dragging ogre or a brain dead zombie.

Tool using creatures are the most dangerous animals. That said I cannot say how many times my character was in the wild and thought he was safe and was killed instantly by a mountain lion jumping on his back - made far deadlier due to combat geometry. Gets me every time.

I guess said another way is that although there may not be exact justice in the parceling of points to all things the playability does not feel unbalanced and if it is - it is not necessarily in the favor of the player character.

I had a look at the combat archery scripts and it seems like he adjusts bow damage for each bow via script. Is certainly possible, but pretty complicated and doesn't work well for everything. I like his mods, but since he removed most of them and some weren't finished it is hard to get a complete combat system out of it. Some things aren't even covered at all (afaik), like spell damage and creature damage. You may think that a sword swinging human is more dangerous than a 1000 pound ogre with the estimated strength of four (real) gorillas, I don't. Try to kill a crazed elephant with a sword or a bow...good luck.

In the end it's a matter of taste. Some people don't care for combat without weapons at all. It's just that the only mod I know of that equally increases all damage without exceptions is my damage multiplier (and yes, I know that I'm blowing my own trumpet here, but I'm simply happy that I found such a flawless yet simple and compatible concept). I can use other mods to balance things with each other and still increase the overall damage. That's what I personally like about it. You don't have to, and Duke's mods are certainly much more sophisticated than my simple mod. If there was a complete overhaul for every single aspect of (Oblivion) combat made by him I would probably use it.

I will argue that this is a matter of perspective.

Again, it depends on how you look at it. Yes, those will affect twice as much health as before, compared to the player's base health, but they keep exactly the same power as before, compared to normal damage inflicted by enemies.

E.g. If you have a Restore 100 health potion, and you're fighting an enemy that inflicts 50 damage per hit, the potion will restore two hits' damage with and without my mod. With your mod, the enemy will inflict 100 damage, thus you need twice as many potions to keep going in a battle.

I'm not saying your solution is bad, only that the balance is shifted in another way than in mine.

True, but the point is to make battles not only faster, but also deadlier. The balance the game introduces is made for a certain amount of health. If I can drink a potion to bring my health up from 50% to 100% instead of 50% to 75% it will be much easier to survive a fight, making the lower amount of health almost meaningless unless I get one-hit-killed. If I can double my health with a fortify health spell instead of increasing it by 50% only it will make everything much easier - almost as easy as it was before the health reduction. So the lower your health is, the easier it will become to survive battles by simply making up for it with the correct spells/potions/enchantments. The one thing where I really found out that it doesn't work well for me was the absorb health enchantment. I was invincible because every hit with my sword gave me back 20% health, which was way too much.

Like everything this is a matter of taste. But you can hardly say that lowering the player health doesn't touch the game balance for certain things. If a weak potion of health restores all my health instead of just a small percentage it is easier to survive, whether you get more damage per hit or not. Unless you get killed with one hit, but that works the same for both mods .

Well I'm certainly not saying that I don't like your mod or approach - in fact if I didn't have access to a more complete Duke Patrick overhaul I very much would be trying your mod out - as in today. I also very much like Kuertee's Attribute Based Damage mod. I guess my initial comment about being similar to Duke is not at all accurate.

As for Ogres - not generally seen as the sharpest tool in the shed. On a level playing field - maybe ultimate fighting champion cage match - the ogre would of course win. But tool/weapon using intelligence on an uneven playing field would win far more often. Which is why we are the dominant species. So yes his mods gear the threat to being more from the from human like NPCs. Climbing those damn Oblivion spires with close quarters and the dremora in heavy armor and with maces - is deadly and requires a lot of thinking fast about combat tactics.

Essentially the question of balance is that in a single player game is all relative (a matter of taste as you say). What may be a challenge for one may not be for others. Some look at damage enhancement and see something they don't like - some look at games that require any player skill (the FPS aspects) and run back to morrowind.

dammit psymon you're making me sad... I wish I could play those awesome duke patrick's mods