SKYRIMLE Civil War Overhaul (by Apollodown)

[oqhansoloqo]

For one, I see that "The Choice is Yours" conflicts.  Supposedly an easy way to handle it is just to let CWO (+ CWO plugin) load after TCIY - you just lose one civil war choice option from TCIY, while making sure that CWO doesn't get broken.

[oqhansoloqo]

BTW, I examined the plugin from CWO and found conflicts with these STEP mods:

 

Audio Overhaul for Skyrim (AOS)

Cutting Room Floor (CRF)

Even Better Quest Objectives (EBQO)

The Choice is Yours (TCIY)

Unofficial Skyrim Patch (USkP)

[Harpalus]

Ignore the USKP conflicts. They're atmospheric at best and interfere with CWO at worst. The only exception to this might be the respawn flags on some of the guards. The USKP fix that CWO partially overwrites is below.

 

Numerous city, town, and hold guards were not flagged to respawn. This could lead to the eventual depopulation of the entire guard force in the affected areas over time. (Bug #17241) [NR]

 

This might be intentional. If this concerns you then either forward the flags and hope for the best, refrain from killing guards, or ask Apollodown for advice.

 

The AOS conflicts are minor but you can forward the relevant sound records if you like.

 

Load CWO after CRF and ignore the conflicts. Conceptually, both mods do the same thing: restore cut content. Anything CRF might do to the civil war will be done better by CWO. CWO includes all cut civil war content.

 

I don't use TCIY or EBQO. My intuition says to ignore the TCIY conflicts because you can't guarantee they'll function properly with the redesigned quests. In any case, the potential reward (ability to skip a civil war quest) is far outweighed by the potential problem (broken civil war halfway through a play-through). Let CWO override TCIY, and check TCIY's dialog records to see if it's affecting any civil war dialog that CWO doesn't touch.

 

Ignore the EBQO conflicts and load CWO later. More specific quest objectives can't be written because the same quest will be used for several different battles and locations. There are a few quest text records that are safe to forward if you want to look through them. Ignore all conflicts that aren't quest objective text entries.

 

STEP has a few script-heavy combat mods that may give CWO trouble, such as Enhanced Blood Textures, Deadly Spell Impacts, and Burn Freeze Shock Effects. These types of mods trigger often in large battles. I don't use them, personally. The best way to test things other than running through a civil war quest or two is to spawn some hostile actors a town. Start a new game and teleport to a city (coc SolitudeOrigin), turn on god mode (tgm), and spawn about 100 hostile actors. (help bandit => player.placeatme <code> 100). The goal is to test script lag and FPS with large numbers of hostile actors. This isn't exactly "scientific", but if your frame rate drops to unplayable levels or Convenient Horses indicates bad script lag then you can reasonably expect CWO to have problems. It usually takes them all a minute or two to figure out that they're supposed to be killing things, so some delay is normal.

 

I suspect STEP will be fine. EBT, BFSE, and DSI have all given me problems in the past, but that was before the memory patch. If script lag proves to be an issue you'll need to remove some mods, and edit the STEP patch afterwards if necessary. EBT probably contributes the most script lag in large battles but you're likely to notice its absence.

Edited June 14, 2015 by Harpalus

[FuzzRocket9]

Great analysis guys. I had no idea those mods conflicted with CWO. Now I see why it's tough to get War Ensemble to run. AOS 2.0 is the only mod I would love to keep. The others can go.

[oqhansoloqo]

Excellent advice Harpalus, exactly what I needed to know.  :)

[oqhansoloqo]

I posted in CWO's Nexus bug forum a couple of the potential issues noticed either by you or me.  I also posed a question about a patch in CWO's forum for TCIY, just to see what kind of discussion/response that gets from people.

[oqhansoloqo]

 

STEP has a few script-heavy combat mods that may give CWO trouble, such as Enhanced Blood Textures, Deadly Spell Impacts, and Burn Freeze Shock Effects. These types of mods trigger often in large battles. I don't use them, personally. The best way to test things other than running through a civil war quest or two is to spawn some hostile actors a town. Start a new game and teleport to a city (coc SolitudeOrigin), turn on god mode (tgm), and spawn about 100 hostile actors. (help bandit => player.placeatme <code> 100). The goal is to test script lag and FPS with large numbers of hostile actors. This isn't exactly "scientific", but if your frame rate drops to unplayable levels or Convenient Horses indicates bad script lag then you can reasonably expect CWO to have problems. It usually takes them all a minute or two to figure out that they're supposed to be killing things, so some delay is normal.

BTW - I tried this.  Creating 100 bandits, then stood up on a raised walkway and watched.  While I didn't look over my scripts using Papyrus logging yet, I did observe the FPS.  Dropped to about 5 and then after a minute someone ran at me and started hitting me and that's when the game basically CTD.  Is it normal for 100 fighting NPCs to not cause this to happen though?  I would think that even 50 would be too much for a game like this to handle well.

[Harpalus]

BTW - I tried this.  Creating 100 bandits, then stood up on a raised walkway and watched.  While I didn't look over my scripts using Papyrus logging yet, I did observe the FPS.  Dropped to about 5 and then after a minute someone ran at me and started hitting me and that's when the game basically CTD.  Is it normal for 100 fighting NPCs to not cause this to happen though?  I would think that even 50 would be too much for a game like this to handle well.

The quantity may have been a little high, to be fair. I can only speak from personal experience here: the last time I did this test was with 100 forsworn in Whiterun and my FPS dropped to around 10, yet remained relatively stable and I finished the fight without issues. Adding script-heavy mods causes FPS to noticeably drop in such circumstances for me, particularly mods geared towards combat. I forget how many actors are in CWO's battles, but the number is fairly high and is likely the source of current instability.

Edited July 6, 2015 by Harpalus

[oqhansoloqo]

I guess I could try temporarily removing the Duel mod and trying this test again to see the results of that too.  I'll get back with you later with the results when I do this soon.

[oqhansoloqo]

I finally got around to playing with this again.  I removed Duel this time to test and at least the game didn't CTD, but the FPS still went down to about 7 and behaviors were odd.  Even after every spawn was killed, the FPS was pretty abysmal at about 15 fps in that area around the dead corpses.  It would go up to normal elsewhere.

 

EDIT: I then tried 50 bandits and the behaviors were normal and the FPS went down to acceptable levels of about 30 FPS.  So I decided to re-enable Duel and the worst it got was about 25 FPS.  If this is the worst it gets with CWO, then that's fine.  I didn't check the papyrus logs though.  Honestly, I don't really know what to look for in those logs anyway, even if I did.