Some noobtastic beginner modding questions....

[iandh]

So I recently got an 8800GTS 640mb and decided to replay Oblivion as I haven't played it since it came out and I had my trusty 7900gt. I played with mods back then but mostly small ones just for fun. I remember how bored I got last time I played, in fact I don't think I ever finished the main quest. I have been relearning things and have a few questions.

 

I tried OOO and MMM, and couldn't get them to work together at the same time. I made sure I had the right esp's checked and all but it crashed upon loading. I switched to Francesco's mod, and it worked well with MMM. After a few hours I found that the amount of creatures and their distribuition with MMM was excessive to the point of stupidity. For instance, one time I walked out of imperial city to find Two boars, a mountain lion, a pack of wolves, and a bunch of rats all hanging out together in a group in a 50ft area in total peace with each other. As soon as I approached, the whole lot came chasing after me. When traveling on roads, there would be so many bandits I could barely travel anywhere. It was supposed to make the world more populated, IMO it just made it overcrowded. I enabled the reduced spawn option, but he might as well have called it the no spawn otion because creatures were so rare I would have to walk around for 5 min just to find a rat.

 

After deciding I didn't like MMM I tried OOO and Fran's by themselves, and found I liked OOO much better. I used the lite version and disabled slow leveling, because the first time I played with slow leveling enabled by the time I got to level two I already had full mithril armor and elvish weapons, several enchanted items, and about 20,000 gold, which I thought was rather excessive for a level one player to have in his possesion. One thing I really did like about OOO was the variable difficulty of fights, and the randomness of items that I could find in a dungeon, sometimes awesome, sometimes not so good. With Fran's, I just found that every fight was too hard and didn't really notice any major gameplay or aesthetics improvements like in OOO.

 

I have heard some people say that using OOO, MMM, and Fran's at the same time strikes a good balance. So my questions are:

 

What order do I load these in, and which of the leveling/creature enhancements should I use?

 

OOO

MMM

Fran's

Natural Environments

Qarl's

BTmod

DarkUI

 

Should I use a mod manager?

 

What should/shouldn't I enable in the mods?

 

 

 

Thanks all, I have trashed about 5-6 characters and about 30 hours of time trying to find something I'm happy with, and I'm not quite there yet but am a lot closer than I was before.

[DeusXMachina]

If you want to use OOO, Fran and MMM together you need to use FCOM and Wrye Bash. Read this page about installation and load order.