Today I was exploring a dwemer ruin as part of a quest I had started. Some automatons and falmer after, I reached what I thought was the end of the dungeon. There were two NPCs there, arguing. At some point things scaled up and the NPCs started to fight each other. The one who survived was a redguard woman wearing steel plate armor and using axe and shield. She attacked me on sight. I remembered myself thinking: ok...let's end this dungeon with a quick, easy battle against this gal. Man, how wrong I was!!

That battle turned out to be the most thrilling, exciting encounter I've ever had in the game!

She blocked a lot, giving very little opportunity to land a clean hit. She also used shieldbash extensively and intelligently, relying on this move when I was close and with my shield down or when I was attempting a powerattack. It felt great; she responded to my attacks with good defense and counters, and she attacked vicioulsy when I was staggered or my guard was down. I was both surprised and impresed. 3 minutes of intense, constant actioan were needed to defeat that female redguard knight. The best 3 minutes of the game for me! And the most surprising thing of it all: no AI tweaks were responsible of this. This occurred with vanilla Skyrim.

So what do you think guys? vanilla Skyrim AI can actually be good. No, scratch that; it can actually be AMAZING. Surprised? Have you had similarly memorable experiences when fighting some NPC? If so, please share ^^

Oh and, by the way, the name of the redguard knight was

yeah its strange that only so few opponents use bashes and give you the feeling of a real fight. maybe when the ck gets released, somebody will make an improved-ai-mod

If the girl you described had the Targe of the Blooded, I think it is a scripted fight. Still, for people that did not expect it, it was still pretty interesting.

Indeed; she had the Targe of the Blooded. I don't think the fight was scripted at all though. What might had happened is that she belonged to a class the AI package of which was much more prone to blocking and bashing, thus giving the impression that she was fighting more "intelligently". According to Pluto (the author of the popular mod PISE) propensity to block and to bash are variables that can be tweaked.

In any case, I hope I can find more opponents like her.

some bandit leaders will fight against you like her

The ones that have shields do anyway. The ones with two handed weapons just power attack me over and over...