So my friend asked me to help him mod out his Oblivion, and I've already got pages and pages of tracked files on the Nexus to form an awesome Oblivion, but one request that eludes me is mod content to make the game feel more "alive". Take from that what you will, but knowing him, I assume it means making interaction between NPCs and creatures more meaningful, and anything you'd call "immersive" or "realistic". I know a lot of mods like this, but I've also avoided a lot of mods that add more spawns and complex interactions, on account of my weak laptop; not a problem on his setup.

Right now I'm looking at Martigen's Monster Mod as a great start, but I've got a few questions first about how it plays with other creature mods; particularly, Lore Creature Expansion and Creature Diversity. In the end I'll be using Dynamic Leveled lists to pimp everything out, but are there any redundancies between all of these new creature mods? DLL lets me filter out any enemies I don't want to see from leveled lists, but that doesn't extend to anything that's static, and not spawned from a leveled list. This will probably be it for new creatures, although I'd also like to filter out MMM's Giants and use http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/44807/? instead, if there are no terrifying consequences from that. If I'm talking about any creature mods that have been deprecated by new versions, it would be nice to know that, too.

I'll also be looking at FCOM for him, but I personally just use Francesco's and dozens of other mods that do what the rest of FCOM does differently. Anything to watch out for with using just Francesco's and MMM? I don't intend to use Fran's new creature or gear add-ons.

Other mods I've found that should make the game feel more "alive", one way or another:

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37088/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/25835/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/18305/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/36216/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/22965/? (my friend actually had a particular complaint that the seat of the Empire was full of nothing but ruined forts. Hot cha!)

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/19628/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/21565/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/32914/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/25536/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/16150/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/19847/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/11474/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/16137/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/29283/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/18065/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/5011/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/8113/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/11169/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/11478/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/21104/?

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/5065/?

Keep in mind, this is mostly just in the order they appear in my tracked files list, and doesn't include any mod requirements. But I know about the mod requirements, and I'm definitely using Wrye Bash to tie things together, so don't worry about that. But it would be nice to know any glaring incompatibilities I may have glossed over, better mods that do the same thing, etc. And I would request that y'all suggest even more "alive" mods so we can make a pretty good thread for not just me.

Crowded Cities and Crowded Roads. Those two have to be in my load orders to make the world feel alive.

There's a couple versions of both so I'm not sure which to suggest to you. I think Crowded Roads Advanced is the one that's the least problematic, but I can't remember which of them for sure is.