SkyRe, and Duel Combat Realism is nice, it forces you to have followers and fight smart or get wrecked. I also downloaded a mod called Stormcloak Friends, it puts like five stormcloak followers in Whiterun, and with the Ultimate Follower Overhaul, you can bring as many of them with you as you want which will be cool for your Civil War play through. I am actually doing the same thing as you. Download Deadly Mutilation, The Dance of Death, and Enhanced Blood Textures - It makes blood fly everywhere, and stay on your weapons/armors as well as chopping people in half or cutting off heads/arms with epic finisher moves. I use a combination of heavy/light armor because it looks cool, but it would probably better to just use a full set of iron armor for the looks and stats. Other than that, I use duel wield War Axes and a Crossbow. The reason I use a crossbow is because you don't have to be as skilled to use a crossbow compared to a regular bow so it makes sense for a warrior focussed guy, and in the huge wars, like the Battle for Whiterun, and Falkereath, you really need to have a bow or you'll die really fast. When there is a ton of enemies fighting the storm cloaks I usually back out and start picking them off with the crossbow then when it seems safe to rush in, I finish them off with the axe. I also have a mod that allows me to block while using dual wield weapons: Duel Wield Parrying and Duel Wield Blocking Animations I use Dodge Mod as well which allows you to push A S or D + your Jump button to perform a quick dodge which is really nice if you're dual wielding and need to dodge a 2 handed guys power attack. And to get better FPS and stuff I use a mod called Optimized Vanilla Textures which reduces the file sizes or something for better performance... Another good thing to is go to the Real Vision ENB page, and read it a bit until you find something about Optimizing your game, and click the link. Follow all of the instructions on that page and it will help you get your game running smoothly, and increase fps a bit aswell as prevent crashing and bugs... Also watch some of Gopher's videos, search his channel on youtube type "Skyrim Gopher" or something. I learned everything about modding from his tutorials, and reading on the forums etc. it will help you a lot, i am new aswell but i learned how to stop CTD and other things from his videos of using TES5Edit and Loot.