You know...this thread is almost inspiring enough to make a mod that cleans a few of those places up...I may look into that. That is easy stuff. I can mod the hell out of that.

If we're discussing dirty forts, and wondering where the toilet facilities are, what about showers?

I mean, I'd like to take at least one shower per day, sometimes more.

Shaving, brushing your teeth - nothing there.

Of course, there's no running water (except for a nearby river maybe), so that doesn't help.

Sigh

What is that point exactly? As others may have a different idea of the point of the game. Look at it from their point of view, they want some realism, or explanation for this. Case in point, we got children to add realism (Which is slightly subtracted due to them being unkillable) and toilets because, as the book says, everybody poops. The OP got an explanation why it is dingy and I see no reason why anyone should think this to be a topic not to be taken seriously.

I agree. Fort Greymoor even has a a maid, and it's still cobwebby.

The Thalmor one. I went in and it was like, WTH?! This does'nt go with the organised Thalmor, at all!

You'd think even bandits would turn furniture the right way up and clean the place. Just so they could eat properly and store things right, if nothing else.

And militery groups like Thalmor, Legion, Stormcloaks, you'd think they'd make them clean it up, as part of militery discipline.

I agree it would take like what 10 minutes to sweep the floors and clean out the cobwebs. If you aren't going to give us some semi clean forts at least put a character complaining to everyone else about how lazy they are about keeping the place clean. For the Thalmor have a racist remark about them not being dirty Nords or something about upholding the high standards of the Aldmeri Dominion.

Well they do guard the Fort all day. They are the ones assigned to the fort, who have to live there. No one wants to live in a filthy environment. Filth breeds disease. In a siege one would have to live in such a fort for weeks or possibly months on end. Disease would kill everybody off within a week if it wasn't kept excessively clean. Besides that, there is no way that could be posted there for weeks and months without getting seriously ill.

I doubt the fact about the American French/German bases during the war and afterwards - I think you don't appreciate exactly how old, disciplined or organised the military is. The human race has had an organised military for at least 5000 years. Look at the Ancient Romans, the armies of Alexander the Great, the British Empire and other armies of that era. The comparison is apt. They wouldn't have survived if they had set up camp for months on end without keeping it livable.

Who are the Thalmor at war with? They aren't at war with any faction in Skyrim. They've also been in Skyrim for 25 years (Since the Markarth incident)

Would General Tullius invite the Emperor for an investigation of his forts, only to show him a skeever infested hole? Likewise, would the Thalmor in charge of Northwatch would invite the ambassador for an inspection with it in its current state?

You underestimate how much cleaning a group of motivated people can do in a couple of hours.



What I also don't understand is why the principal base of operations of a hold for each faction is a temporary camp, often sitting in the middle of a field, and often at a tactical disadvantage to an attacking force.

Not to mention the forts that are located so that a besieging army would have the advantage. (There are a few up north where the fort's battlements are below a hill less than a bowshot away, allowing a group of archers to pick off every soldier manning the fort, while they have to charge up the hill and fire bows against gravity)

Or like you say, no fort in the game has a permanent garrison. All appear to have displaced the previous occupants (and the forts must have been occupied), yet the previous occupants weren't dug in deep enough to avoid being displaced (Whereas the foresworn in the reach have been entrenched in redoubts there for 25 years)

What gets me about that is Fort Greymoor. Fort Greymoor is right next to the busiest trading hub in the province and is not only a strategically important site for a Whiterun garrison, but is also a mass of freely available stone that could be used for building materials/trading materials to other places in the province, as happened historically. Yet the initial occupants are a group of bandits, and the fort changes hands regularly without Agnis even noticing. You've have thought the city guard would have cleaned out the fort because of the risk to merchants and either occupied it or torn it apart to repair damage to the city stonework (or that someone would have just torn the fort apart and sold it in the aftermath of the Great War)

Wasn't this a problem in Oblivion too? At least people are seeing the value of forts in this game rather than leave them to bandits/necromancers/daedra/bears. It's a nice touch that you have to claim forts in the Civil War, if only there had been more to it.

I assume the reason for all the dead forts is because Skyrim has been at peace for so long. It's not until the Civil War starts that there's anything resembling a conflict in Skyrim.

With people like this around who care little for fine detail its no wonder so many things are overlooked in the game because people like this will be busy chopiing heads off and looking at kill cams to care.

I can see his point. And the reason it matters is..... well, I keep saying that Bethesda's strength is in it's world building. In all the interesting and nifty locations they make for us to explore. Given that, it would make sense - it would be better world building - if there were also "more orderly" versions of some tilesets.

If you think about it, it is kind of odd (just like it was in Oblivion) that there don't seem to be any "well maintained" forts. They're almost all wrecks occupied by bandits.

Ditto for Fallout 3.... yes, it's "post apocalypse". But it's 200 years later. You'd think that at least someone, living in one of the more established and defended places (like Megaton or Rivit City) might have swept up or maybe washed the walls. Heck, that's even a good minor judicial punishment - "you screwed up, but not badly enough to be shot or exiled. Community service! Go clean up deck 3."


edit: also, what stormbird said about militaries

Go fort yourself.

Oblivion's forts were even less sensible. They were around every corner and many of them didn't have any kind of realistic layout with regards to places to sleep/eat at.

Posts like this make me sad because this is where people should be using their imaginations to determine things. Maybe they just took the fort over, maybe its because the thalmor are arrogant bastards who don't like to get their hands dirty and are currently looking for servants and slaves to clean it up. Use your imagination to come up with what ever reason you want instead of running to your computer and complaining something doesn't make sense. I mean its a fantasy game.

In Oblivion it didn't make sense that every cave and dungeon had a door so I just made up my own story that one of the past emperors had gone mad in his elder years and worried that rats were banding together to over take him so he commissioned the east empire company to put doors on all mines, caves and dungeons. Its not a logical explanation but thats the beauty of a fantasy game.

Oblivs forts actually were inactive ruins.

they've all got better things to do than worry about cleaning

I tend to agree with the trend of posts in this thread that idle military garrisons for a disciplined and organized army have many chores to complete on a daily basis. Even if you are under constant threat of attack, you have a watch duty, you have a mess duty, you have a cleaning duty. This is how organized armies run their operations.

Even Roman camps were highly organized, structured, disciplined, and you better believe clean. They were made to withstand an attack, and set up to hold back a siege. A messy, damp, dingy old fort would not hold out physiologically or psychologically to any sort of siege. You need order, discipline, and organization to do that.

The Thalmor and the Legion should have clean forts. That's really the only way I see it. You can argue all you like that they just moved in, or that they aren't planning to stay long, or that they are under constant vigilance for potential attacks. However, the bottom line is that we are talking about a garrison, not a camp. Furthermore, we are talking about an organized military operation, not a bunch of so many mercenaries. These groups have discipline and structure, and they would certainly turn a table upright if there was one to turn.

The Thalmor torture and keep prisoners at Northwatch Keep so why would the clean the place. Bandits like to get drunk that is the reason for turned over tables. Legion forts should be clean though.

The Thalmor just want a place to torture Nords, so they used a cruddy old brick and mortar building. They take shifts going back and forth to the Embassy to bask in luxury and bring back food and booze.

The reason the place is still dingy, however, is that the Justiciars love to parade dirty hands like battle scats.

You're not going to like what I have to say, but ...

If you put in a few hours with the Creation Kit, you can create your own Thalmor or Legion dungeon that is clean and well-kept. It might even take less time to just delete some of the clutter in Northwatch Keep and add a few torches, weapons racks, chairs, and (upright) tables.

The time that you've spent reading and responding to the posts in this thread could have easily been spent creating a brand new medium-sized dungeon in Skyrim ... rather than time spent on a series of slightly cynical "Beth should have thought of highly organized, structured, disciplined garrison" thread posts.

One other forum-goer has already pointed this out:

I agree with the op. The interiors should make sense with the story, circumstances, or lore. A fort with Thalmor flags, bedrooms, training room, armory, etc would make perfect sense. When you step in, you shouid know that you're walking on Thalmor territory. It would add even more variety and make it that much more interesting.

Me too. Most of the military I have been aquainted with are big on keeping things spic and span.

Forts in oblivion looked a little too clean if I recall correctly. I like the run down look in skyrim, just reinforces the idea of an empire that is very wel past its prime.

Even Whiterun looks like a ruin outside.

It's really boring and annoying theres nearly no shiny, well kept place in this game. Oh, except Dwarven ruins...mostly...

This is a forum, this is what you do here.
Wouldn't it be better if you actually could convince Bethesda and help them do better games in the future than having to mod everything over? This issue here is so obvious that it shouldn't be needed to be modded.

And its not fun at all to go "adventure" in your own dungeons that you just spent hours on and know in and out.

You're far away from Cyrodiil , go back to the clean stuff if you want

Something else. There are caves that are cleaner and tidier and more logical than forts. Really. Look at the caves. Theres caves with no cobwebs, upright furniture, tidily stored items, swept floors, that make sense. From bandits to vampires, if they live there, the place is properly set up.
But apparently they don't with forts, even with a maid.