ITT: Strong-hold Construction in Skyrim...

I'm just going to start off by saying that I'm the type of fan that loved Morrowind but hated Oblivion... nevertheless, I hope you'll read my post for the information and not in association to my prejudices.

One of my fondest memories from Morrowind is creating my Strong-hold for the Telvanni House quest line. My brother created the Hlaalu strong-hold, and to be honest, I have no idea what the Redoran Strong-hold is like.

Among my many many many other disappointments with Oblivion, the lack of a personal strong-hold was quite high on my list.

At the very least, I'd love to see the personally constructed Strong-hold make a comeback in Skyrim.

However, I have a few ideas about how it could be taken further.

As every fan knows, Bethesda makes available with every game a Construction Set which allows players to edit and build inside the game-world. While everyone is perfectly able to use the Construction Set to build their own Strong-hold inside the game-world, it breaks the immersive continuity of a play through and really feels like cheating.

My suggestion is thus...

Inside the game, players can acquire plots of land from whomever owns the land, (getting the deed, permits, either purchasing them, being rewarded with them, claiming them through strength (intimidation or just killing the owner), or gaining control of them through factions), and going to the plot with a hired "architect", can enter "Architect Mode". "Architect Mode" is really just an in-game version of the Construction Set, which allows players to "design" their buildings, inside the game (but only in the plot). Saving this "design" generates a "blueprint" inside the game-world, which the architect gives to you. You can take this "blueprint" to a construction company or your faction, and hire them to build the structures. Then, as time goes on in the game world, your building will be slowly constructed as can be best deduced by some sort of construction algorithm. You can hire people, get slaves, or whatever, to populate your new strong-hold, house, town, business, mine, trade-post, farm, whatever...

Obviously, this process would be insanely expensive, and different resources may have to be acquired for different construction materials. You might acquire "trade contracts" for the materials and objects... either through overseas trade, or through local companies and mines, etc. etc.

The gist is... its an extremely cost and labor intensive process that is very difficult, but the feeling of the end product would just be... indescribably amazing. The more difficult the process, the more rewarding and meaningful the result.

... Then again, maybe I've just been playing too much Mine-craft lately...

-- EDIT --

A more feasible but still very very interesting idea from Liuken

If it isn't as you described, for me personally I'll mod it in. im going along the lines of using every aspect of Skyrims percieved economical utilities like farming, smithing, mining etc etc to serve the stronghold in all spectrums. and the Stronghold itself to stave off against what Im hoping is a slow but sure degredation of the game world as Dragons make thier rampages, if not Ill go about learning the scripting so that they attack that castle/Fortress after a time, and to really get it running I'd need to rally survivors from the attacks

I think it should be limited to strongholds when you reach the top level in guilds and each guild should have a limit to the type of building you can create. Such as the Mages guild's love of towers so you would limited to a towered structure, but you could design around and warp that as you please. Much the same as Morrowind was as each house had a certain type of stronghold it favored. I don't think you should be able to build your own house/town etc. Now if a town would like to spring up around your stronghold then that would be an interesting development especially with all the talk about all the random events in the game, but you wouldn't be able to control that. Use the Mage example again and say you were the Archmage then people of magical abilities would likely gravitate toward you and form a small community around you if you would allow it and same with the FIghters guild and others. I would like to see houses like the Telvanni come back but in Nordic form to add variety to the mix and with those you could have more freedom to build. There should be an option to auto-build for those who do not want to take time though.

Yes, I quite like your idea, and it's a bit more contained and feasible.

I've recently been playing with a mod for NV called Wasteland Defense. It lets you choose a spot and build up your defenses. Then you have to fight off raids and such. It's a lot of fun, but also feels a bit tacked on, which isn't surprising considering it's a mod. I'd love to see something similar built into the game so it's more fluid and seamless. It'd be awesome.

... I take it this would be something for the consoles? This topic comes up on every forum

I have never played minecraft, but I have seen screenshots/gameplay videos... the complexity of creating a minecraft dungeon/landscape is not even close to the complexity of creating an Oblivion/FO/Skyrim dungeon/landscape. There could be an option to have 3-4 preset models than can be enabled depending on player's choice, but I'd think PC players would prefer total control of what they are building with the construction set. I don't think it is possible to make the CS work in-game.

Not necessarily, in fact, I was thinking that my style strong-hold building would have to be exclusive to PC.

But I've actually rather taken to Liuken's idea at this point.

Brilliant idea. In morrowind the keep/tower made you feel like you made your mark on the world, something physical, at least in bytes. I would like to see it limited to the type of faction architecture. And it would be great if at the different stages more and more people started to live there such that by the time you've created your uber keep you have a little village surrounding it.

It still applies that the strongholds would need to be pre-staged, and enabled in-game as the player makes the choice, just like the different house themes in Fallout.

Don't get me wrong, though. From a role-playing perspective, even if you have preset strongholds, buildings, etc., it'd add to in-game immersion, which is a good thing. Personally, however, I would prefer to do it myself in the CS, because I can make the structure exactly how I want it. The way I do it, I made mods for both Oblivion and Fallout where I have self-upgrading strongholds: as I play the game and find things on the wasteland, my strongholds get upgraded.

If any of you have New Vegas on the PC, I suggest you go download Wasteland Defense.

In that mod, you choose your site. Any site. Once you put down a water tank (it is the desert, after all), you start putting down other important buildings. These include an HQ, Armory, Barracks, etc. Then you can build towers and walls, hire guards, and so forth. Then, you have to defend it from raiders. You're also able to find plans throughout the wasteland for structures to add to your fort, including a solar power station so you can light it.

If something like that was built into the game, it would allow it to be much more elaborate with easier to use features, I would suspect. You wouldn't need predefined sites, just sites that are adequate for it to work. Wall building could be handled more easily, as well as pathing around the new fort..

this is TES not THE SIMS

But but but they had construction for your own Strongholds in morrowind !

My, how astute you are.

You're right, this is TES, and the features people are discussing where in previous TES games in one form or another.

Morrowind had strongholds for each House. They were built in phases, though in fixed locations. Bloodmoon allowed you to build a whole town.

Oblivion did away with the strongholds, but allowed you to buy houses. Rather than upgrading the buildings themselves, you just upgraded their furniture.

So now people are discussing these features on steroids. Not only the ability to build a stronghold or town, but also the ability to choose your location and lay it out as you choose.

That's very TES.

I think you, the OP, is complicating things a bit too much. IMO, it doesn't have to be that heavily designed. For me, the perfect stronghold is dictated by a core set of qualities that any game developer should be able to design as part of the game without massive effort. But instead, they waste time on creating a bunch of individual houses that each have flaws and limitations. Why not just create 2-3 houses but follow the rules I'm mentioning below? Or just 1 place that feels just about right, regardless of your career and style:

- It should be it's own world location with a separate map marker (instant travel to your own doorstep)
- Upgradable sections, rooms, etc
- Not too spatial, walking around your home and storing different categories of items too far apart is boring. Preferably a medium house, similar to Rosethorn Hall in size.
- Lots of UNIQUE (and/or uniquely named) containers, not too few in total but not too many of the exact same model either. The Frostcrag Spire vault was badly designed.
- All amenities, preferably upgraded through a house upgrade system. Enchanting should still require some device/workbench, as should Alchemy, Smithing, etc.
- The house/keep should be centralized on the world map.

Alternately, the location can also require you to retake it's control, something which the Benirus Manor is a great example of. I did like that Manor to some extent, especially with the idea of it being cheaper than other houses but haunted. But I just didn't like its layout, that's all. An ancient keep off the beaten track could be infested with goblins or maybe the undead and, once purged, it could serve as your base of operations. Depending on your fame and upgrades, more and more allies would flock around it and more. You could even have your own shopkeepers and the Keep would eventually become a court for that piece of land.

No, it's more like a strategy game rather than TES.

Putting down buildings, walls anywhere, changing the landscape with it dynamically?
Yeah not gonna happen... ever.

I think instead of focusing on in game building i would give us more ways 2 play with the AI characters in the constrution set.

It's not nearly as ambitious as the OP's suggestions, but I definitely plan on building a mod similar to the Battlehorn Castle DLC for Oblivion. I hope to set it up to be done in stages like Battlehorn was and similar to my new Bison Steve Mod for New Vegas.

Is this to be available for we 360 users? I.E. not just the mod business of PCs.

I like to have a stronghold...but only for collection and display of my items. I would like it if Beth made something similar to the armor stands and dummies that the Mod community always loves, just as long as it's mobile then even the 360 owners could show off their prized possessions.

The stronghold quests in Morrowind were brilliant, as they allowed you to do something exciting after finishing each great house quest line. However, every bit of those quests are created using roughly the same quest and script system available in Oblivion, so if anyone wanted to, they could replicate the same type of content in Oblivion. I voted to bring back the Morrowind style stronghold building, as it requires nothing but will from the content designers - the tools to make such content is already present.

You might want to look into http://fo3settler.webs.com/apps/forums/topics/show/3840777-rts-new-vegas-guide for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I think that system would work well. Maybe an overhead view would make it a little easier though.

Looks like the Feng Shui mod for Oblivion, in that you can place a few spawned assets. Cool stuff, but there's a lot of stuff you just can't do in game, like interior cells, lights, doors, etc..

I considered scripting such a settlement builder mod in Oblivion. It's all possible to let you place buildings and interiors ingame, and you can even let the script make random citizens with on-the-fly generated AI packages. The biggest hurdle in Oblivion is the pathgrids though. You don't want to have NPC's trying to walk/run through buildings and then getting stuck. OBSE provides functions to detect and disable pathgrids, but in my opinion the spaces between the pathpoints are too big in the normal Oblivion landscapes to get proper pathing by modifying this automatically though script. It would work in prepared areas though, if you as modder place the pathpoints very dense.

Another issue is savegame bloating. Everything you place will be stored in the savegame, not in a plugin file. Now if we would be able to do the latter, I'd start working on it right away, since that would also allow sharing your ingame creations with others!

But even then, it's a big task. The existing Oblivion models aren't really suitable for ingame building, since most of them are transparent on one side. Hence you'll need a lot of new models, and even more if you want to have builder NPC's that build them real time, since you'll need several stages of each building.

That mod includes one interior space. You place a door and it comes with all the necessary markers to actually use it. I'm sure there was no other way of doing it, but you first place your building, then you place the door separately. That means you can have you door no where near the building it actually goes to. But yes, everything else is exterior only. It does allow you to place exterior lights, though.

That said, this was a mod created using what was available to the modders. If Beth sat down and hard coded this thing into the game, I have now doubt that you could do a lot more with it.