Whenever a dragon attacks city or village every single citizen with a weapon is trying to hunt and kill it.
While one the one side that is quite funny to watch, it does break the atmosphere.
If a fearsome dragon shows up in a city, why the hell is no one actually scared of it?

Furthermore, due to the fearless villagers, dozens of important quest persons die whenever a dragon attacks.
At some point this will leave all the towns totally deserted, apart from guards and children.

What I would like to see is, that everyone apart from the city guards flee into their own houses when a dragon attacks.

I usually hear people say something like "I'm not gonna be a part of this!" and then run inside the tavern to hide until it's over. There are many who (illogically) don't, though.

Don't expect NPCs to be super smart like everyone believes, they just have simple alogorithms. So expect them to do stupid [censored] every now and then.

I wish enemys would run far more often than they do. Its really annoying when you jump on a rock and unloading arrow after arrow and they just stand there or run in a circle. Uggh. Btw, does that exploit still work in SR?

Indeed is stupid they havent tought of influencing all npcs to flee may be with a demoralize effect ....

They need to be more cowardly (practical), like people in real life.

I'm curious as to what hidden stat determines whether an NPC will fight or flee. Responsibility? Level?

Guards should fight. The blacksmith should probs hide. Sven, who likes to think of himself as a hero, should probs fight. You know, whatevs.

Thats alot of work though, theirs like 3000 unique personalities in Skyrim.

nords arent pansies.

In my game it seems most citizens run for their lives, some dont.


Essential characters in the game cannot be killed. Minor ones can. its part of the world.

If the Creation Kit is anything like the Construction Set, you would just set a villager's Confidence level very low or at 0 and they will flee after taking very little damage or flee immediately. I'm sure someone will mod this to correct this problem... just don't ask me to do it because I don't want to go through every actor in the game and carefully adjust their Confidence levels.

Yeah, but I thought they did these things by simply making up characters randomly, then placing them and giving them some background relation to their environment. Procedural generation with a little bit of manual smoothing of the edges isn't too terribly labor-intensive.

I guess they just didn't quite make dragons have enough of a "demoralizing" or "fear" effect on them.

I would also point out that having the wolves and crap that attack dragons out in the wild really need to get a little visit from good ol' Charles Darwin. What kind of pack-hunting predator continues to attack a predator twenty times their size when half its pack got incinerated before they even got within range, and where their pitiful fangs won't even scratch the target's scaly hide? The extinct kind, that's what.

Lol. Yea, this kind of behavior is funny to say the least. Just had to save the town of Dawnstar from a dragon last night cause I just happened to be there when it attacked.

Can Whiterun, Riften, or instanced cities etc... be attacked by dragons? I haven't experienced any attacks like this.

It is confidence level. There's a heck of a lot of NPC's, though, and I'm not sure which ones would need changed, so I don't think I'll quite tackle this yet. Certainly possible with tools right now though.

Yes. I pity the dragons that swoop down on a Giant though. Sadly, I found a dragon just outside of Whiterun. I had no idea where it had gone, but I came across it and absorbed its soul. Then I figured out what killed it as I was launched 300 feet into the air. The dragon soul sound drowned out the OH DAMN YOU'RE GONNA DIE sound of the giant. Didn't notice the screen shaking cause of all that.

It's just as ridiculous to see a really old lady brandish a dagger and start attacking you if you fail a pickpocket. I wouldn't put too much thought into this as the combat of NPCs is based on their aggression, etc stats in the CK. It's not easy to tweak that without making every NPC afraid of their own shadow.

Those are usually the ones who wear no weapon.
One of the easiest solutions would be to take away the weapons of most citizens (would still require a lot of effort though).
Of course that would make it easier for the player to kill random civs.,
but since I just thought of this as a mod, there would always be the option not to use this.

Of course this doesn't change awkward animal behavior but it could be a start.

If you don't change the NPC's confidence level, they will still attempt to fight with or without a weapon. If they don't have a weapon, the NPC will simply look for a weapon in the environment to fight with.

There definitely need to be some general tweaks to the NPC behaviors all around. I can't wait until the Construction Kit is out so I can start digging into behaviors. There definitely is a lot of room for improvement, especially as far as villagers and combat (specifically with dragons).

Fought 1 in Solitude, 1 in Windhelm, and 2 in Whiterun so the answer to that is yes. Just visit a city a lot and it can happen.

Yea, I was escorting some guy to that cave with the tree and was attacked by bandits and he grabbed a woodcutters axe off a shelf and attacked them, haha.

well I know for sure that riften can. It happened to me yesterday, and luckily i killed the damn thing before it could take out any villagers.