Duke Patrick's CombatTweaks
For SkyRim


Get it here:

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/1066-duke-patricks-combattweaks/


This is a work in progress!

This Mod is NOT made with FallOut tools! I only used SkyEdit (a program made to work with Skyrim).



The latest features:


No Auto Aim! (the attack magnesium) Now attacks for BOTH the player and the NPC will miss more often.

Reduced disarm chance

Actors react more to getting hit! Quick attacks are still a little too much like hitting smoke but power attacks get a good reaction now.

Blocking an attack consumes much more stamina and attacking consumes a little more stamina but the rate you regain stamina is increased. This is a first attempt to prevent button mashing by forcing you to pause your attacks frequently but not for too long.

Once I the CK is out I will be doing a lot more with this concept of combat PACING with more effective disadvantages to reducing your stamina to zero. Thus eliminating the button mashing combat.

Armor protects much more now.

Shield and weapons block a LOT more damage now, you will now actually feel a difference when you allow a weapon to hit or you succeed with a block.

Weapon and attack range is greatly reduced and now much more realistic.

Warning! Testing weapon range by hitting objects in the game is erroneous! The game engine (like oblivion) uses a SEPARATE system for hitting objects as it does for hitting living targets. In my Oblivion Mod I had a script to try to fake the distance to hit objects based on the weapon range but that is not going to happen in Skyrim for a very long time (I need some sophisticated script commands to do this).


Sprint stamina cost is greatly reduced unless you are carrying too much weight. Weight has much more effect on your stamina consumption while sprinting.

Block Skill will matter much more now to block damage. So although your shield and weapons can block a LOT more damage you sill not do so unless you have a LOT of skill.


INSTALLATION

Copy the file " Duke Patrick's CombatTweaks " to your Skyrim\Data folder and enable it in the Data Files section of the Skryim launcher.

Hi Duke,

Glad to see you here in the Skyrim mods' forum!

I had some ideas to improve melee combat in Skyrim and, seeing how some of them are already included in your mod, I think I may explain you the rest to see if you find them interesting/worth-adding (provided that it's possible before the CK release, of course).

Ideas:

To help prevent button-mashing:

Tweak: All forms of attacking cost a fix percentage of your fatigue bar.
More specifically:

Tweak: If your fatigue bar drops to 0 you will automatically kneel down for 3 seconds in order to catch your breath. You will be completely defenseless at that moment. (I would use the kneel down animation that plays when opponents have very low health).

The tweaks above are balanced by the two tweaks below:

Tweak: fatigue regeneration is much higher (you already did that)

Stamina = Strenght: the more fatigue you spend on an attack, the stronger such attack will be. The proportion is “for each 8 points of fatigue invested, +1 point of extra damage”.
Implication: this is what makes increasing your fatigue useful. If attacks cost a fix percentage of your fatigue bar, having a fatigue bar of 100 or 600 doesn’t matter. However, if attacks do more damage as more fatigue is spent on them, then the size of your fatigue bar suddenly matters. Example:

Then I also thought of adding some damage multipliers here and there:
Tweak: Hitting the enemy’s back has a x2 damage bonus
Tweak: Power-attacking a knocked-down enemy has a x3 damage bonus

Let me knoe if any of this appeals to you Duke.

Tiny Lampe.

Duke Patrick, I love you.I'll be enjoying this for next few minutes, TYVM.

Side note: Your mod always reminded me of the system in this game:

Basic Combat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sQQDtZDC9g
Parrying and some more Combat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ait1gBedLsc

Have you played it before?

My good Duke! I just want to thank you for all the work you've done! And I'm excited to see you have come to save the day in Skyrim!

FINALLY! I knew that you were somewhere brewing your magic. Even a preview version has me wanting to leave work early to try this!

I like tiny lampe's ideas actually. Saving up stamina for stronger attacks seems like it'll make things more tactical. Has to go for enemies too (with accompanying AI tweaks) else it might punish the player too much.

I'd also like to request a blocking-damages-stamina-not-health version for shield blocks, with higher skill reducing stamina damage taken. This way, when you block, you're trading defense for offense (specially when coupled with tiny lampe's ideas). Weapon blocks though can either still damage health or make it so that there's a chance (based on skill) that the attack gets through and deals health damage.

Duke, can SkyEdit already tweak weapon reach? And I'm guessing "Actors react more to getting hit!" means that stagger will be more pronounced rather than occur more often as a result of hits?

@tiny lampe: DP's previous mods already included combat geometry so you can be flanking and being flanked will hurt

EDIT: I didn't notice this the first time I read it: "Weapon and attack range is greatly reduced and now much more realistic." This may be my most needed combat tweak for skyrim since I started. Now maybe my very lightly armored (fur!) 2 handed axe orc can actually dodge and hit this time.

Though this "Armor protects much more now." might spell my doom

Eagerly awaiting more tweaks that make lightly armored 2 handers more fun to play

Oh wow I didn't think you'd be releasing this quickly.

Well out comes the duel mod.

Thanks much - look forward to more.

... cool cool cool.

Lol, my thoughts exactly! You and I have seem to have very similar mod tastes

You say that now block skill will matter much more to block damage. In vanilla game, your block skill, shield wall perk line and any effect supposed to reduce the damage you take when blocking, only increases the damage you deal when power bashing. The damage reduction by blocking is fixed to 85% for shield, around 50% for two handed weapons and around 33% for one handed weapons and torches and never changes.

What you mean is that you fixed this, or maybe you weren't aware of this and so your changes on this only increase the power bash damage further?

Also, I think the block skill should have more influence in weapons (specially in one handed ones) than in shields, as else a 15% of soaked damage increase would suppose a 100% in the case of a shield, while in the case of a one handed weapon, with a 48% of soaked damage, blocking would continue being pretty pointless.

In case people are too lazy to register for TES Alliance or the site doesn't allow them to download things (like for me, script issues), here's Duke's mod on Skyrim Nexus: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3646 , uploaded by himself (no idea why he didn't link it in his original post)

So glad to see you working on a mod in Skyrim, when i saw it this morning I didn't even think about it, I instantly installed and seeing as your not really into endorsemants I decided to vote for you as file of the month. Even if it is just the start of your project the joy you brought to my oblivion experience with your combat and magic systems was immense.

On a side note, now we have wards any chance in the future of you doing a remake of your deflecting spells geometry? As this would be awesome and was the first thing I thought of when I used a ward.

If I may be so bold as to make a few suggestions for this mod.

I would like to see the weight of the weapon/shield (and controversially the weight of the chest piece of armour as it effects the arms) directly influence the stamina loss for EVERY swing or raising of the shield. With a higher skill level reducing the weight affect. As in real life swing something enough times we don't feel the effects of its weight so much when we time it better and build up muscle, hence the skill factor. Ever tried keeping a 10kg weight held up at chest height for long. This would also mean investing in stamina remains important, as many times there are occasions where I'm fighting multiple targets, and would like to atleast have my investment in stamina rewarded.

I would also like to see stamina and weight have a direct influence on the speed between swings, again mitigated by skill. Thus the more tired the harder it is to maintain aggression or defense. I'm sure if you like this idea you'll find a way of making the shield raise slightly slower also, this would also give the player an indication of how tired the NPC is too, and make a better tactical choice.

I like the idea mentioned that when stamina reaches 0 that the player/NPC is open to be attacked easier. Also would like it if you cannot swing or block any more, a mage cannot do spells with out magicka, neither should a melee fighter be able to swing a weapon or raise a shield without stamina.

I understand at the moment your limited in the scope for this mod as this can only be tweaks to settings you can access until the arrival of the CK, when I look forward to your awesome scripts, and thanks to you once again.

I think one of the main problems is that stamina starts to regenerate so fast once it hits 0. There is no downside to 0 stamina either. And you can perform a power attack with 1 point of stamina, even if it would cost 70 points normally. So basically all that happens when you run out of stamina is that you need to wait 2-3 seconds before you can perform the next power attack. Waiting until stamina regenerated to a high value is a waste of time, even with faster stamina regeneration. So I think by increasing power attack cost all you will achieve is that a high stamina base value is more worthless than before.


What does this mean? The vanilla armor cap is 80% and it's pretty easy to reach the cap even without exploiting the alchemy/enchanting/smithing combo. My character has capped his armor rating and he's pretty much invincible, even on master difficulty.


I think the sprinting feature is mostly useless in combat. Maybe a bit useful to close a gap between the player and a ranged enemy asap sometimes, but other than that it's not needed. Whether I can sprint longer or not doesn't matter much to me, except for exploring the world a bit faster.

Other than that I like your changes and I'm looking forward to a more sophisticated overhaul made by you once the CK and its scripting language is out.

Thank you very much for that link!



Indeed, I've thought the same thing. Here, take a look through my http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1299411-concept-damage-overhaul-not-tactics and let me know what you all think. I don't know how realistic it is to do in Skyrim, but I suppose it can't hurt to dream, eh? By the way, it's not a "combat tweak" per se, but a damage tweak that just happens to affect combat.

I've being playing the game with this mod for a few hours now and have noticed a couple of issues. Some enemies have a tendency to run away once engaged in combat. I didn't think much of the Draugr doing it but when my level 7 character caused a giant to run away for about 30 feet before fighting me I started to notice. On the subject of giants I've noticed that a lot of their stomp and club attacks aren't hitting me at all. I managed to kill a giant whilst being directly in front of him, not moving, with said level 7. All the while he was kicking at me and swinging his club. The attacks are registering (I get staggered, the camera shakes, the controller rumbles) but I take no damage.

Other than that though I'm enjoying the changes. Especially the new blocking mechanics.

Good to see you modding here Duke!


Will definately do some play testing of this mod, and let you now if I see any bugs.


But you know I have to ask= any chance of your combat magic making a revival? The magic "ward" spells have such potential! They just need some serious tweaking in terms of mana cost etc.

Hmm, I played with it for ~5 hours and haven't found this issue. But I also play with PISE which tweaks AI and I believe confidences as well. Most things are one-hitting or four-hitting my level 27 Mage Thief as usual on Master difficulty. Gameplay for me has been normal.

Since I play a Mage Thief I can't say I noticed a huge difference except Sprinting takes up more stamina.

Not sure what the author means by "Armor protects you more", as my Armor Rating hasn't changed? Is it less armor rating now needed to hit the 80% cap?

The following is pure speculation but it makes sense to me:

First, I believe that the changes on "weapon reach" may be the culprit.
As you know, this mod reduces weapon reach considerably. Thus, if you want to hit an enemy you have to get closer. Else you won't touch him. Now you, the player, can easily notice that and adapt. What about the NPCs/creatures though? Perhaps they are scripted to think that, at a certain distance (the vanilla distance), swinging their weapons will result into a hit. Now this distance has changed (it's shorter), so if they are not scripted to realize that the required distance to hit is indeed shorter, they will be bound to hit from too far and will miss a lot of swings.

Makes sense?

That's what I thought as well but I haven't tested it yet myself.

Something on another thread (SkyEdit) made me wonder: Duke, were the weapon reach changes implemented by editing the pertinent value for each weapon or was there a common setting for all?


If something like a global setting affects all weapon reaches, the problem with a dagger hitting from farther away would still likely be there. But the giant reaches, even though universally shortened, shouldn't act like that.

Also, while using the Duel mod, I noticed that weapon reaches seemed shortened but animal attacks appeared unchanged. A mudcrab had longer reach than my 2 handed axe.

I am going to try to work BACKWARD thru the posts. But as you know this site LIMITS the postings you can make per the time spent posting, so if I end up tired of WAITING for the dam "cool down" time to elapse and instead I stop posting before I get to your post please do not take it personally. Any "issue" you see at this time is either something that will have to wait for the CK in January or is NOT something I see myself in my game and therefore I cannot do anything about it. I can only "fix" things that I can duplicate on my end.

Keep in mind that this mod at this time is ALL just game settings and so MUST BE LOADED LAST! Otherwise please do not make bug reports as they will likly be un-reproducible on my end becasue I load my mod last.

@ Norbingel

Testing weapon range by hitting objects in the game is erroneous! The game engine (like oblivion) uses a SEPARATE system for hitting objects as it does for hitting living targets. In my Oblivion Mod I had a script to try to fake the distance to hit objects based on the weapon range but that is not going to happen in Skyrim for a very long time (I need some sophisticated script commands to do this).

The AI accounts for all the range factors including game settings and weapon settings. BTW this is only a game setting mod so for now there is no individual weapon range settings, only a global one.

I have not seen this issue yet with the giants, but I will make a point to fight some in the next few days and watch for this.

I am noticing some NPCs are just straight out running from me. Not random - I beat on them once very hard and then they bolt. They go to the edge of a cell from what I can tell and stop running. That is new with this mod?

As for geometry - it seems to me that the NPCs in Skyrim do angle a lot more than they do in Oblivion.

More stamina for sprinting? That is the OPPOSITE of what I see in my game. That is strange. Are you loading my mod last?

I guess it could be because you are lugging more weight than I am as ( weight carried / your max carry weight ) has much more effect on stamina drain now for sprinting. I am typically at 350 / 400. So I assumed I was on the high end, I cannot imagine most players would go more than that as I believe in this game it slows your general speed down. But I may be wrong on that. Need more testing to be sure.


Armor is now capped at 95% not 80% that is what I mean by "Armor protects you more". This will be more important latter when I adjust the weapons damage to be more realistically lethal.

I may lower this to 90% however, it will depend on what I can do in the CK concerning weapons.

I am VERY sad to see MANY of the oblivion game settings are NOT in this game. For example I have not found any setting that will adjust the HIT CONE
that extends from the actor. Without this it seems it will be impossible for me to make the melee attacks more focused (meaning the attack hits in a smaller area in front of the actor). And that is one of the PRIMARY changes that makes all the other changes I want to make feasible such as COMBAT GEOMETRY!

Without any way to change that I am not sure how much I will mod this game.

Not until the CK is out and possibly the script extender that can give me the sophisticated commands I will need to do it.

This "game tweak mod" is only a few baby steps in the right direction. Once the CK is out and I can actualy use scripts the name of this mod will change to

DUKE PATRICK'S - COMBAT OVERHAUL Mod

And will include Melee, Archery and Magic combat.

Once an INI system is available for skyrim script mods I will script in swithces to turn on and off features but untill then "you get what you get, and you don't throw a fit!"

Looking over my game setting changes I am not seeing anything to explain this and I have not seen this in my game yet. But I will keep my eye open for this issue.

Are you loading my mod last?

(1) Right, as I said a lot more needs to be done to make draining your Stamina a BAD THING! Screen effects are GREAT for this and I love it as it truly inflicts negative reinforcement (immersive simulated pain ) for such bad player combat practices! But I have a lot more in mind once I get the CK such as exhaustion animations that hinder your actor.


(2) mmmmmmm... you are assuming that there is NO "vanilla" effect on your combat what so ever for low fatigue.... er... I mean stamina... You could be right but that would be so very much a ridiculously silly and horrible change from the way the Bethesda has done this in their past games (like Oblivion) that it makes a sour pain in the pit of my stomach to even think about it! Low Stamina SHOULD have a negative effect on almost everything you do in the game such as how much damage you can inflict and how well you block! I hope you are wrong! (I hope and assumed that there are a lot more vanilla repercussions for low stamina) If not I will change this using scripts and the CK. Stamina (fatigue) is an EXTREME key component to the way my combat mechanics work. I use this as an important determinate factor (along with many other minor factors such as combat conditions and actor stats) for combat events instead of yucky dice rolls!


(3) See my other post on this.


(4) Must be a play style difference with us then, because sprinting is about 25% of my combat (effectiveness) for me in my game. I always open up with a running over head leap and chop critical attack to the first opponent in a group (using the perks for this) resulting in a one hit kill on that guy so I can then turn my attention on the next 3 or 4 guys! BTW the perk system is terrible and I will be changing this dramatically with the CK. There are far too many "perks" that should be STANDARD game mechanics for all warrior actors as well as some (like blocking arrows with a shield) that should be used even for the milk drinking actors that have no combat training.

(5) THANKS and .... Me too!

One thing I'd like to see is shouts used by the higher level draugrs being more dangerous. Fus Ro Dah only very very rarely knocks me off my feet, usually it barely has any effect. And when I fight a draugr up close and he tries to shout it almost always misses.