This is awesome and informative, major Kudos to you. Now everyone has a link to use when the ever present "Which Overhaul to use?" thread pops up.

:stare: Almost that time of the month again, so here's the bump to stop this thread sliding into obscurity

yeah this thread helped me pic my fav overhaul, and its explained in an easy to understand way. This thread should be stickied fo' sho

This thread menstruates?

Threads are chicks?

hmmmm....

this thread is really an interesting Read! I am one of those "casual gamers", br Default as I wimp out for sleepyness at about 8PM, and earlyier if I use my 6PM time for talking to anyone!
much of my free time that I spend at the senior Home, is doing things with and for the other residents. I walk outside a lot, my NA genes Feel freedome to be outdoors in the open air; i cannot sit still in a chair for over 30 minutes! ADD.
Probably I will play the frans though to the end of the game, I have MMM also but maybe I should not use even that one.

There seems to be of several kinds of Players here, one that loves to overcome monsters, wants lots of monsters, good for people with short attention spans.
the other players seems to be the "origin of the mage guild" type of player who loves deep DEEP introvoluted quest mods with a very good story.
I am of that camp. immersion and story. but sometimes it is days before I play between sessions and "poof" the memory of what happened last week has Gone Away!


I See It Now: my Oblivion, and Morrowind too, will be like as if I am a Janitor with an IQ of 90, wandering into a cafe or library where there are books that are far far "above" me, and the people in the cafe all have doctor's degrees and they all are like those two film major kids that I recently overheard at a cafe, where one guy was telling the other guy about the ten foreign films that he saw last month and then he listed who played in each, who directed the movies, and most of the movies that were directed by these directors, plus what movies these actors also played in: all in about two minutes, talking like a mchine gun!!
me?
I, in those two minutes, *might* be able to think of one movie and i would have no idea at all who played in it, or directed it.
Thus, I am tempted to just bash monster heads!! but no......I will not; I will wander around as a tourist, admiring the complexity of it all.

[beginning when I got out of the Air force, in 1968, every single job from then on, whther for years or of one week, was ALWAYS waorking for a lady boss, and always where I was at the very bottom of the employee pecking order. a janitor, for instance. Often everyone in the building was really my boss, thus I will probably approach my Oblivion the same way, as if I was the only freshman level student in a university that only has graduate students, fro other colleges, for students! been this way for exatly 40 years!]

a "rube" in new york city, to the max!!

not to mean to have this a "pity party", I would play, whther i would want to or not, a copy of my life. I might like TIE better, for a overhaul mod! to sneak around and not to disturb the Rulers in charge!
But!
--is not playing a RPG partly in trying new role models?!

I answer with a true story, a story of someone that I knew about who was a grey vibrational clerk in a state office, a most mundane job, filing cabinents was his 1980 way of life.
he did have a dream though, to own a cadillac car!
one day a very very used one came on sale, near where he lived, only $500, and was looking in good condition: he bought it!
but alas, he sold it in three months!
why?!
----weeeeeell, he found that he could not live up to his dream! this car "asked" him to become a character that he could not support, after all, he was a grey clerk, not a bon-viant with the ladies who drove fast and took risks!
[never ever wear a hat with more character than your own; I read this somewheres]

I will probably try the "learning of stories and magic" approach, not the "kill anything that moves" way of gaming!

freestone

this thread is great!

hey hey!

how about Spike Jones?!

or...

Mockingbird hill"

or...

The typewriter "song" by Anderson [?]
---a piece of music about four minutes long that was nothing but the sounds of a typewriter typing, in a melodic "song"!

freestone

You've got me there - Spike Jones is before my time. I remember music before Bobby Vinton but not that far back. I just now looked up the very first song I ever remember hearing on the radio. Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Admiration_Society_(song)

But to say something slightly on-topic: this is a wonderful thread and I link to it often. Thank you very much, bg2408.

I''ll add my thanks too! I have this thread "stickied" in my favorites folder
Thank you bg2408.

It helped me figure out a few things too.

Okay, I know I'm a bit late to this thread.

So I'm using Francesco's leveled creatures mod for my new oblivion game. The things I hated the most about old Oblivion scaling, in-order, was:
1. Actor scaling (ie, goblin warlord is like superman and gloom wraith virtually unkillable if you are level 50 compared to say, level 25). Human NPC enemies are always certain level compared to the PC.
2. Ridiculousness of every bandit using glass/deadric once you past certain level.
3. Guards always stronger than the PC.
4. NPCs are always stronger or equal to the PC.

Now, from this thread, it seems 2 and 3 are fixed. However, dose it solve the issue of 1 and 4? I really hate the fact that the very same goblin warlord/Marauder Warlord/gloom wraith etc with the exact same item/name takes 10 swing to kill at level 25, now takes 30 swings to kill at level 50. Simply because their hp scales like crazy while PC damage is pretty much capped. Really takes the immersion of RPG out when leveling actually make you weaker relative to the enemy.

So I'm wondering if FLC actually fix those issues, or if OOO is the way to go (even though I really hate the fact OOO adds bunch of other gameplay stuff like HP change/new item that I do not need or want, but are part of the core).

Thanks.

OOO deals with this. You can find details on it in http://devnull.sweetdanger.com/OOO/OOO_Guide.html, but generally speaking enemies are level capped but not completely static, i.e. an enemy may be between, say, Lvl 20-30 but never below or above it.

Dimeron, you have exactly the same issue as me. I like the place centred approach of OOO but I don't want all the other stuff it does. And I don't like the way it turns the game into a monster-fest. plus it doesn't cover SI.

We have talked about player centred and place centred play. Someone should programme a time-centred approach. All enemies and loot level with time. This is a perfectly realistic assumption. If your character gets stronger over time, it stands to reason that other characters will do the same. The ridiculous thing about player centric is that NPC's levelling is linked to the character. This is not only unrealistic but upsets the incentive to level. Time centred would deal with both these problems.

The mod that hasn't been mentioned on this thread (because it's new) is CUO. Like TIE it is totally random.

Except that OOO is place centric versus player centric.

I for one do not want my forts to be "hard" based on some arbitrary order decided by the developer.

I've used Francesco's for the entirety of my current game.

I don't think it fixes it, but given how easy it is to make powerful weapons and/or spells, it didn't affect my game much.

Well, my answer was regarding the OP's questions:



I didn't even comment on the stuff you bring up. :shrug:

One thing to keep in mind when thinking about overhauls -- especially if you're mostly worried about what happens at higher levels -- is that Oblivion has some very deep scaling issues that are almost impossible to completely solve. All of the overhauls deal with it to some extent, but none of them completely resolves all of these issues. You also may want investigate some player leveling mods like nGCD, Progress, etc., since that's a big part of the overall equation.

Fran does cap the scaling on some enemies, but it's perhaps not as aggressive as OOO in this respect.

For example, a Vampire Patriarch in Fran will be min Lvl-9 but has no max cap, so he will scale with you to whatever level you achieve (causing the same problem you describe). The same Vampire Patriarch in OOO will be min Lvl-22 and max Lvl-32, so he can only scale with you to Lvl-32, after which you will become more and more powerful relative to him.

Fran caps Gloom Wraiths and Goblin Warlords around Lvl-30, but he doesn't cap all NPC enemies like this. With NPC enemies, Fran varies the pattern a bit, making some of them capped and others not capped, so you won't always know how powerful an enemy could be. One Marauder Battlemage could be uncapped and scale with you forever, while another one could be capped around Lvl-20. This keeps you guessing.

OOO/MMM/FCOM are a bit more structured than this, adding new high-level enemy types and usually giving distinct names to different "tiers" of enemies so you'll have more of an idea what you're up against.

Another thing to keep in mind is that vanilla Oblivion was really only designed to be played to around Lvl-20. By that point you can meet or find everything the game has to offer. Fran sticks fairly close to this (bumps it to Lvl-25 or so). OOO is designed to stretch things out much further, slowing the rate of progress and spreading out the content "tiers" through Lvl-35.

So, while some of the mechanics are really very similar, the overall effect is very different among these overhauls. Not that one is better than the other, just different.



Can you explain what you mean by that?



Interesting idea. I think it would be very hard to achieve, but perhaps possible.

Another approach would be the Fallout 3 scheme where the scaling for a given zone is tied to the level you were when you first ventured there.



Yep, and that's either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view.

I don't know why it would be so hard. I would have thought you could have a simple formula based on the Oblivion date with an element of randomness applied, triggered at spawn for those that spawn and for those that are permanent triggered either at set points on the calendar or calculated when the character is encountered. But I know nothing about Oblivion scripting so I defer to the experts.

this is a thread that i will save. I am now playing morrowind, awaiting a few mods "maturity" before going into Oblivion.

I have yet to choose which overhaul to use!

that New One, CUO, exists.

then there is yet another overhaul being developed. I tried to find it, but could not, in my minute of looking.

?????

Pseron!

I was not aware that you loved MMM!
I will keep what you wrote, below, under my hat, to see what I will do, when I play, which overhaul to use!



freestone

To make time-based scaling work you'd have to completely replace the normal spawn list mechanism with scripted spawns, or you'd have to adjust the player's level automatically based on how long you've been playing. Either way it would be very tricky to do without a lot of negative side effects.

Thanks for the explanation. I guess if it had been straight forward someone would have done it by now.

Dev

I only just noticed this question.

I didn't intend to be rude about OOO. I meant two things.

Having spent a lot of time choosing exactly which mods I want, I don't want an overhaul to add other general improvements and game changes other than the ones that are logically dependent on the overhaul. I can't remember what all these are as it's a while since I looked but there are changes to potions, torches, a version of Harvest and other things. Now you may tell me that all of these changes are either an essential part of the overhaul, or are optional. If that's true I would withdraw the point.

The other point was that when I installed OOO the place seemed to be teeming with monsters (despite a relatively slow respawn setting) so that a greater proportion of the playing time was spent in combat, which I didn't really want.

Having said that, I will probably play the game through once with Frans and once with FCOM, which is clearly a prodigious feat of software engineering. If guys like you had been programming the game from the beginning it would be even better than it is.

Best

Hfffoman

I agree. If modders had designed the game for themselves, likely it would have turned out to be the most hardcoe, genre specific, non handholding and beautiful work of art in the gaming world...

...but sales would have been crappy because the masses wouldn't get into it and we'd be broke.

Finally got rid of that I know my way around the forums a bit better now Regards BB

Hi A real stuff up there . mu reposting of someone eles's post I mean
I'm still not quite getting this forum thing. A reccomendation i'd give would be the Poop Project. I learnt an auful lot about installing mods by carefully following Triggercuts instructions
The Popehat Oblivion Omods Project
Its a great place to start learning to use mods and on making mods compatable. I will be going from there to FCOM, but it was a great confidence builder Regards David

Hi Beebee again another total asside has anyone found "living in Oblivion Nondricks Non adventure" I think Layman would rather like it . It's gotta be the oddest Oblivion Journal I read yet
Is it possible to post a link on here ?