1: Alchemy feels quite difficult to raise, so I propose this solution: Discovering a new property of any ingredient yields experience equivalent to making one successful potion. Discovering multiple properties at once would yield the experience multiple times. For example, making a potion out of two completely unknown ingredients and subsequently discovering a single effect on each ingredient, would grant experience worth three potions. (potion + 2 discoveries)

I also considered allowing a failed potion to grant experience, but only the first time that the failed combination of ingredients is attempted. I will have to see how it pans out with the first change before I know if this will be worth adding.

2: The synergy between crafting skills is too great, but I do not feel that the crafting skills are individually broken. Therefore, I will remove the ability to craft any recipe (potion, enchantment or otherwise) which improves the effectiveness of any crafting profession. Items found in-game that improve the effectiveness of crafting, such as enchanting potions or forgemaster's fingers, are still fair game.

3: I dislike the fact that it is very easy to reach the armor rating cap. I don't have a specific formula down yet, but what if the cap was removed and the damage reduction was changed to a diminishing returns curve?

4: Add footprints, and a small plume of powder while running through the snow? Ideally the footprint and powder would be scaled down if there was less snow at the specific spot on which you stepped.

I have a few more ideas that I'm mulling over, but would like to see your thoughts on these first.

Great.

Nice. I would also make something to avoid players to raise the crafting skills too fast, making it seems more natural. Such as making daggers give no experience after some level, restricting the skill level according to your character level, etc.

I also never liked caps. If you can implement diminishing returns, awesome. And designing a formula for that is pretty easy.

I agree with the fact that it is too easy to raise smithing, and enchanting to a lesser degree.

I didn't really like the idea of making daggers give no experience after a certain level, or restricting the skill level according to your character level; it sounded too much like the armor cap. How does this solution sound? If I plan to implement a diminishing returns curve for the damage reduction amount on armor rating, what if your respective armor skills moved the curve?

For example, at level 20 light armor you would gain these damage reduction amounts: (not actual figures)
100 AR: 40%
150 AR: 45%
200 AR: 47.5%

And at 40 light armor:
100 AR: 42.5%
150 AR: 50%
200 AR: 52.5%

And at 60 light armor:
100 AR: 43.75%
150 AR: 52.5%
200 AR: 57.5%

This would allow a character to take full advantage of powerful armor only if they were appropriately skilled in it's use, and help minimize the difference otherwise. This makes sense as well (at least to me); the more skilled you are at something, the better you can take advantage of what it has to offer.

What does this actually achieve? It doesn't make it any more difficult to level smithing early, but it discourages this by reducing the benefits of doing so.

I haven't yet thought of a way to reduce enchanting skillup rate, if it even needs such a thing.

Very nice ideas!

Another alternative idea for changing armour cap:

For a given armour rating, the first x damage from a given hit is ignored, and any additional damage beyond that is reduced by y% - up to a total possible maximum of 85% or whatever of the damage from a given hit ignored.

I make this suggestion so that the cap can be moved significantly higher while still making armour useful for low-level characters.
Here's an example with some totally made-up numbers:
Let's say that iron armour with a heavy armour skill of 20 gives an armour rating of 100 - which gives 5 flat damage reduction + 10% reduction of any damage beyond that. Against a wolf attacking for 10 damage, that's going to be significantly useful, and well worth having for a low-level character. Against a draugr deathlord, not so much.
But let's say well-smithed ebony armour at a high level gave an armour rationg of 500 - giving eg a flat damage reduction of 50 + 50% reduction of damage beyond that. You'll be well and truly capped already for low-level enemies (15% or whatever will still always get through so you're never completely safe). But you'll only have e.g. 66% damage resistance against a 150 damage attack from a draugr deathlord, and so there's still plenty of room to go higher with daedric armour.

That flat damage reduction does sound good Polycrates. It has a cap, but the cap would be irrelevant to content which is at your level. Also, as you stated, it would leave more room to raise the % damage reduction, which can really only go up to 99.

There is a point I can make against this, however. 40% (or even 10%) damage reduction against a wolf with a damage output of 10 would not provide a huge amount of protection, but 6 (or 9) damage when you have 100 maximum health doesn't have as much of an impact on your life as 99 damage (66% of 150) would with whatever your health ends up being. Unless you reach >1100 health, but I don't think that's possible.

This means that even though you would be receiving less benefit from armor at the lower levels, armor is also less important because enemies are not moving your health bar as much. I will need to study the damage output of opponents to learn how their damage scales through the levels before making a decision.

What do you think about also not having every smithing recipe at the start? To gain each new recipe, you would need to "reverse engineer" the piece of equipment at a forge. This would be very similar to enchanting, but it would further discourage early smithing grinding, encourage exploration and looting, and potentially leave room for more recipes than vanilla. An alternative to reverse engineering could be finding/purchasing instructions on how to make the equipment, or have an NPC teach you. Maybe have all three options with each providing access to different recipes?

The amount of exp your potions give is based only on value of created potion/poison, which confused me when I first started using alchemy and got 4 skill points for 100+ potions.

Now I can mass produce potions with high value (and level alchemy ultra fast) but don't have any use for them, could you make it so that generally potions with 2 effects give static amount of exp and the same thing for potions with 3 and more effects?

I was unaware that potion experience scaled to the value of the crafted potion. Having static experience based on the number of effects possessed by the crafted potion does sound nice, would you also like the discovery of new ingredient effects to add one-time experience as previously planned? I at least like this because it encourages the search for new ingredients.

What I would like A LOT that eating an ingedient would have a chance to discover extra effect from ingredients (not just the 1st one) and the perks would increase the chance of it happening. I find it very very tedious that you have to discover everything by yourself and experiment when there are so many good alchemists and written books and noone of that is acessible to you. Of course implementing REAL alchemy trainers and books would take a lot of time, so I ask that you make discovering ingredients a lot easier then it is now, because any sane person will look them up on the internet.

I like the idea of using books, and potentially trainers, to reveal new effects. The books wouldn't have actual text of course, but be similar to spellbooks.

Also crafting skills should never be able to go over 100 skill, as I mentioned in my smithing remake thread. capping these professions is something bethesda should have done in the first place.

To balance armor cap whole combat would have to be redone and level scaling removed, we are far away from that stage now. Currently higher levels are balanced on the fact that player has 80% dmg reduction, and there is a problem that heavy armor svcks and needs more perks while offering the same level of protection.

Do you mean that crafting skills are trainable beyond level 100, or that they should not be able to receive more than a 100% boost via potions and enchantments? Removing the ability to boost crafting via crafting already solves the later. I was not aware of them being trainable past level 100 in the case of the former.

Combat would not have to be redone as long as I can tweak the curve to fit within the current balance schema. Level scaling would not need to be removed if you consider my previous post on armor importance. It will probably require a good bit of testing to get it right though.

I think this is genius, really, because it would absolutely solve the issue of crafting top tier armor way before it starts appearing in the game. Someone would still be able to grind smithing if he really wants to, but won't be able to craft, say, ebony armor before finding at least one piece of it in the world.

Also, do you know how exactly armor works in this game? For example, how much reduction I get from 100 armor? And 200? And how much from the skill?
I don't think I'll be able to help you changing the way armor works because I don't even know how it works now

I'm not sure on the exact values of armor currently, but I do know that damage reduction is capped at 80% with 576 armor rating. It was my plan to research different armor protection levels after the creation kit is released.

The protection curve would probably not need to be moved with armor skills if the reverse engineering idea is used. You would need to have a good bit of luck to achieve a large armor rating early in the game (rather than just crafting it), and minimizing changes to combat mechanics would be preferable. I would also like to leave the option of being able to fully use powerful equipment early in the game intact; finding something really good but not being able to use it effectively takes away from the "ooh shiny" factor.