Thanks to anyone who suffers through reading this and can forgive any of the misconceptions I may have about some of these mods. I am doing a fresh install and I had a couple of questions about the larger overhaul mods and compatibility/immersion/difficulty/progression.

Firstly I only have minor experience with OOO(basically none), and more recently I tried to give TIE a whirl. Now my issue with TIE was that while it may be more immersive and realistic to have things such as Spider Daedra, Xivilai, and OH GOD IS THAT A SPECTRAL-XIVILAI, as the daedra who destroyed Kvatch it was also rather game breaking to have all of those on the first quest in the storyline at level one(in heavy armour with a shield and stocked on potions) and getting 1-2shot with my only healing spell(with Restoration as a Major) being worthless. Having to constantly repair my gear and having it all completely broken on any fight with more than 1 enemy was also kind of annoying. I get it, come back and try it later... I can appreciate the more random nature of TIE and get how some people would have a blast with it, but its just not for me.

On the flip side, I do dislike Oblivions level scaling allowing me to beat the entire MQ at level one. So I would like to play with an overhaul that mostly removes level scaling, just not to the random extent that TIE seems to do. Which is a shame, because I do like a lot of the features TIE adds.


So that leads me to wanting to try out OOO because it seems to be more progression and region based, where the farther you get from civilization the more dangerous it gets. A bit more like Morrowind. But in the readme it describes adding new creatures and items, which sounds cool, but Id like to keep it as close to vanilla Oblivion as I can in terms of environment and feel.

So Im not interested in giant pink goblins or flying squid or flaming wolves or anything ridiculous like that that doesnt really fit. Im not a lore nut or into heavy realism or anything but Id still like to keep it Tamriel, which is one reason why I dont want to use MMM or Frans Creatures/Items addons(so, no FCOM either). But just the basic Frans looks interesting for level changes, though it seems like it would conflict or be negated by OOO?

And one other concern about using OOO is higher level content. I really like Morrowind, but as Im sure everyones aware after level 20 you were godly. That makes sense, youre a hero you should be able to clear a cave of smugglers with the flick of your wrist. It just wasnt much fun. So I was wondering if OOO(and Frans) suffer the same issue.


Then theres Giskards CUO. Hopefully someone can clarify exactly what this mod does for me. Ive read the readme, and not to disrespect Giskard, but most of it seems to be a tirade about some other modder that really does not interest me(although I certainly agree with trying to make mods as compatible as possible) so most of the readme doesnt tell me much(I admit it, I skimmed that part of the readme). I am left with the ESP description section, which details what each ESP does. Are these all of the changes?

If they are I have a question about the leveled lists. "This file unlevels the randomly Spawning NPCs and Creatures so they can appear at any level. " if Im reading this correctly it seems to do the same thing that TIE does, unleveling loot and creatures making every encounter random. This sounds like it would be interesting to use with OOO, where it would add a bit of randomness to the generally static lists(that is if Im reading OOO correctly as well). But I wouldnt want to use it if it goes overkill like TIE does(IMO).

Theres also "Only the top levelled list needed editing" and Im not entirely sure what this means. High level creatures, stuff only after level 20? Like different lists affect different level ranges? And how does having multiple leveled lists effecting a spawn point work? Does it randomly pick a list to use to spawn a creature or something? From what I understand when you encounter a spawn point it looks at the leveled lists and spawns something appropriate, but I had thought each spawn only had one list to choose from. So idk, this parts a little confusing to me.

All of Giskards other mods look really interesting and I intend to try them, but do any of them conflict with anything in OOO(since that seems like the main overhaul Im going to use)? Specifically it sounds like there might be some overlap with dungeons/caves and NPC factions.




TL;DR: I would like to use OOO along with CUO, are there any conflicts I should be aware of? I want a more unleveled progression based Oblivion, but not totally unleveled and randomized like TIE is.

Stability and performance are important to me(for example, I dont use Better Cities because it kills my FPS while I run fine without it).