Valenwood Improved. Options

[Renee]

This thread is going to be dedicated to Valenwood Improved which can be found here.

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/225...iption&BH=2

I know a few of you have experience with VI. I am installing this now (reinstalling, actually, just to make sure I get all those meshes & textures and whatnot). I do not have any Elsweyr mods, so I won't have to worry about patches there.

So far, I am noting four archives included with Valenwood Improved: Full English, Full German, English Update, and German update. Apparently, the mod's DESC page is out-of-date. Its installation instructions say

Please unzip the archive and extract the folder completely to Oblivion\Data\ (without the *. txt). .

But that is incomplete. According to a couple random gamers in the mod's POSTS section, it's best to install..

1). Full German first
2). Full English second (overwriting stuff)
3). English Update.

Because apparently the German version has a few things missing from the English version? How does that sound, so far? Right, or wrong?

This post has been edited by Renee: Sep 27 2020, 05:32 PM

[Renee]

An update on Valenwood Improved. As my orc has attempted to travel away from Arenthia, Valenwood's initial town, results have been mixed.

-- Arenthia itself is amazing, yet not overstated. It is a rather unusual town, as it is built upon a mountain side, and its main avenue climbs upwards. Lots of people. It is obvious VI's mod author spent a lot of time making this area.

-- Outside of Arenthia, results have been mixed. The countryside looks no different from the mainland Cyrodiil. Same trees, same road textures, and so on. I don't see this as a huge problem, but if the entire province is like this, it won't be as interesting to explore.

-- Valenwood is annoyingly dangerous. Especially for my Level 1 orc, we're already seeing bears and even a lion. There is no real 'progression' like there is with my modded Cyrodiil, or even vanilla Oblivion. Witchcraft makes no difference, here.

I looked into this via the Construction Set. Had a look at VI's Leveled List markers, only to find ... there is something wrong here. Every marker I clicked on is showing Deer, Imps, and Wolves for Level 1, so how can we already be seeing alpha predators? I figure it's gotta be something going on with my mod list, specifically MMM. Maybe MMM is influencing Valenwood, somehow. However in Cyrodiil, MMM portrays a more balanced list of enemies. It's never frustrating. Yes, some super-dangerous creatures show up, but there are plenty of easier ones around, too. And like I implied, Witchcraft has a habit of keeping the dangerous creatures from blindly attacking most of the time.

-- Finally, there is one area where a broken bridge lies, roughly a half-mile outside of Arenthia. There's some sort of trigger here, or I don't know. If my orc passed through this area, BAM, the game would CTD, or even worse, it would freeze up! ... And I'd have to Ctrl + Alt + Delete my system. That's something I've rarely had to do! Argh.

Again, I found this area in the Construction Set, and tried to see if there's anything obvious (such as an X-marker which goes with a half-finished quest) which might be causing this. No luck! Maybe it's something to do with distant load textures, I don't know enough about landscapes and how worldspaces are built to be sure, though.

Overall, maybe some of this stuff will go away if I finally learn how to make a Bashed Patch (right macole?) so I'll give myself X amount of time to learn how to do this. There are pictoral guides for WB after all.

... and if that doesn't help, I'll have to move on! I can't spend too much time cleaning up somebody else's messes when I've got my own to clean up!

This post has been edited by Renee: Oct 12 2020, 07:30 PM

[Pseron Wyrd]

Every marker I clicked on is showing Deer, Imps, and Wolves for Level 1, so how can we already be seeing alpha predators? :

I know this is nearly a year later, but I think this is most likely due to Maskar's mod. Depending on your .ini settings, MOO can randomly bump up ordinary enemies to boss-level enemies. In its default setting Maskar completely over-rides vanilla leveled lists. What we see in the CS does not apply in-game.

For the purposes of level-scaling MOO divides all enemies in the game, including vanilla enemies, into four groups: "grunts", "bosses", "named bosses" and "extremely hard bosses". The chance of a grunt being replaced by a "boss" or higher is dependent on your .ini settings and on your current location relative to the nearest vanilla walled city.

As an example, I have my MOO preset at a modified "Expert" (an average of 6 levels above my character, down from the default 9), which means that every enemy in the game, even the lowly vanilla grunt, is an average of 6 levels above my character.

At the default normal and advanced presets you have a 33% chance of turning a grunt into a boss enemy in zone 3 (3 being the most dangerous, which is how MOO categorizes Valenwood). The Expert preset bumps this percentage up to 50%. The boss has a chance of being bumped up to a named boss and the named boss has a chance of being bumped up to an extremely hard boss. These are a lot of percentages to work through, so the chance of encountering an extremely hard boss at an early level is slim, but it is possible.

In short, Maskar can make regions outside of Cyrodiil especially tough!