Makes sense. I'll have different percentages of speed based on weapon type. With enchantments to swing full speed under water. I'll see about possibly adding spears, harpoons, etc.

Just make sure I can cast some touch spells at least. I can shoot lightning at a dragon soaring 200 yards in the sky, but I can't electocute a slaughterfish three feet away from me

Electrocute in water.. mhm hmm Better have some resistance to electro on you.

Lightning bolts out of my hands, I better have elecro-resistance for that too, lol.

No that's just you casting. (You cast the effect away from you.) Casting electro in water should have an effect comparable to casting onto something that has reflect.

Same as that fire in water shouldn't work or should be greatly reduced, and frost could be quite disastrous unless targeted and used with care.

You miss the most important aspect: It's magic.
You shouldn't be able to breath underwater. Should we remove that spell, lol.
I'll have my fire, shock, and frost spells underwater. The physics, that's just an afterthought, lol.

haha you need a complete underwater overhaul with all this. Why not specific rare sea dragons when you're in the northern sea... I don't know if this fits in the lore though. Or at least some big creature of the same caliber with similar long and tough fights. Argonians would have the advantage here.

Also, allow Argonians to "Sprint" underwater, to symbolize that they can also swim faster than other races.

Combat underwater might actually work, in skyrim, because of how movement animations and combat animations have been separated. Then again, maybe it it would have issues -- this would be very interesting to experiment with.

And, of course, if all else fails, we could have abstract "animation-free" combat, perhaps with text describing the action.

Meanwhile... personally, I think that anything with a weapon swing animation should be slower (let's say half speed) and weaker (let's say 1/4 damage). In part this is immersion (pun not intended.. or maybe I should have intended that pun?... anyways water makes it hard to swing things and ideally nothing using swinging animations would be used underwater) and in part this is balance -- slaughterfish just are not that dangerous, for example.

Actually, I think that the ideal "underwater weapon" would be a spear (or something with a similar animation). So if you can team up with someone making a spear mod and doing the animations, I think you would be way ahead.

And, finally, for hardcoe immersion fans, active combat under water (stamina drain) should also use up your available oxygen supply. So in one variation of this kind of mod there would be a lot of "heading to surface" and paralysis or even slow might be particularly deadly (even worse than paralysis is, out of water, if timed right against a non-water-breathing foe).

Another "hardcoe immersion" feature might be armor weight (or perhaps total inventory weight) influencing either buoyancy (ideal) or swimming speed (quick hack). One maybe plausible implementation of this might be: anything up to 25% inventory capacity has you swimming like now, anything over 90% and you walk [not run] on the bottom with some kind of transition between the two (almost 90% and you are swimming on the bottom, maybe?).

For that matter, a relatively trivial "underwater combat" hack might be to remove swimming animations from everything that can fight but not in water, and have everyone walk [not run] on the bottom of the body of water. This would also limit travel in the deeper parts of the ocean.

no underwater combat is just annoying. not least it is not as bad as FONV, since slaughter fish can't follow you out of the water like those fish mutants.

still it is annoying to not be able to fast travel becuase a school of fish that can't reach you on land is hostile.

Your avatar is rather pretty...

On topic, I was planning on trying my luck doing underwater combat scripts as well. I'm sure SKSE will make it possible. With enough people working on it I'm sure it won't be long.

I really like skyrim for the most part. Most of my complaints are in the "Silly" department -- I definetly didnt see it coming when a dragon sekeleton fell on me..

..But this is probably my biggest real issue. I mean, I can't figure out any of it. It seems like every single part of what they did with underwater was a terrible idea. Which svcks bencause what they did with rivers and how water works otherwise is *fantastic!*

I'd like to fight underwater too. And the swimming animation is so lopsided.

As Talos as my witness, I swore I read the topic title as "Combat Underwear".

This is what I thought as well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo2efCOzkqo#t=2m17s). Even the view looks worse than in Oblivion; my argonian finds the water surface especially offensive >:L
(and then there's the fact that I gasp for air...)

I've heard plenty of people say that there is too little water in Skyrim, but I find that the sea of ghosts has a lot of potential, if only swimming weren't such a disaster.

Thanks for all the ideas, guys, I will definitely try to implement some of these.

I've read it as that a few times to.

I get pretty frustrated when I'm underwater and can't fight back. I'm all for this. Added to http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1318920-req-free-form-play/.

Why is it everytime someone brings up the Combat Under Water thing SOMEONE has to step in and say "You know what.. It's underwater! You CAN'T FIGHT underwater!"

....

You can't summon dragons, throw fire balls from your hand, or freeze enemies solid with your voice either. Take your realism somewhere else, if we wanted realism we'd play Farm Simulator 2011. =P

Oh! That is because we signed the secret "You cannot fight underwater conspiracy secret agreement". I would tell you what the agreement is about, but it's a secret. And, I can only tell you about this because it was my evil twin that signed the agreement, and not me.

(You asked!!)

You have no idea of annoying it was to find out (with seconds of air left) that you can't cast breathing underwater spells, underwater (Or perhaps you do).

The great Dovahkiin ultimately met his demise when he was unable to defend himself from a lone salughterfish.

I think the easiest and somewhat hilarious attack to animate while swimming is to have bite attack.

Still nobody else for aerial combat? 'tis a shame. A shame indeed.

Yeah I was somewhat annoyed at the lack of underwater fighting because I like exploring underwater and picked an argonian so I wouldn't have to worry about drowning... then I realized that there is only one underwater enemy and it's really weak and uncommon and easy to outswim anyway, plus there's almost nothing worth finding underwater, so underwater combat wouldn't have been of much use anyway.

Seriously though, I'll bet they probably removed it because the feature was rather silly in Oblivion, where you could have groups of bandits follow you in and have epic, silly, highly unrealisic underwater battles. If they did include it they would have to fix the water physics and enemie AI to accomodate it in a believable way, which would be way too much work for something that would rarely be used, same reason they didn't include horseback combat.

I will include combat in the air just for you, Khajiity Kub. It won't be much of an issue if I'm already doing combat underwater.