LE Realism: Leading armies instead of taking a fortress by yourself

[opusGlass]

I normally stay away from mods that mess with Skyrim's difficulty/balance too much, but today it occurred to me what my idea of perfect Skyrim combat would be. (This may or may not have been inspired by watching too much Game of Thrones.)

I should need to lead a platoon of soldiers to capture a fort from bandits. I should need a band of loyal fighters to clear out a Draugr crypt. I should need a league of plunderers and adventurers to raid a Dwemer ruin.

I'm sick of this one-man-army style of combat that Skyrim (and most single-player games) relies on. It's immersion-breaking that I can kill 20 bandits in a fortress alone or with a single follower. First off, one-on-one combat needs to be a real challenge. Unless I've already got a full set of Daedric Artifacts I should expect a challenge when killing a single enemy. Second, enemies should really swarm and gang up on me. When I launch an attack on a fortress with 30 bandits inside, there shouldn't be only 3 bandits to kill while the rest wait inside in their individual rooms. There should be more enemies positioned together, and with more mobility, so they can truly swarm.

"But opusGlass, if there's two dozen enemies swarming you and they're just as strong as you, how can you possibly win?"

Well, you need an army of your own. That's how people win battles in real life right?

I think instead of leveling up your combat skills until you reach god-level strength, the main progression mechanic should be recruiting more and more allies to fight with you. Some ideas of how this could be done:

- The normal "do me a favor" mechanism to make friends

- Hiring mercenaries

- Obtaining titles such as Thane to get a small troop of guards

- Ranking up through the Civil War to gain a battalion of guards

- Ranking up through factions to recruit troops from them

- Using speechcraft to convince people that helping you will benefit them

- Using Illusion magic to enthrall people

- Killing bandit leaders to make their followers loyal to you (requiring thief skills and speechcraft)

- Killing necromancer leaders to make their followers loyal to you (requiring necromantic skills and speechcraft)

- Raising undead / conjuring daedra

- Taming animals with mechanisms similar to Druid mods

Depending on your RP style you will probably want to use different recruitment mechanisms on different playthroughs.

Obviously the first step (other than making combat more difficult) is to disable the follower limit, or tie it into the player speech level or something like that. Similarly, you could have a thrall limit tied to your illusion level, an undead limit tied to conjuration, etc. The other stuff is a bit more complicated.

I don't have the skill or time to make this myself (or at least, not by myself) but I think it's good to get the discussion going. Any ideas on other recruitment methods? Any other changes you think would help with this vision? Any problems with this idea you can think of (probably a lot)? Or maybe there is already a combination of mods that makes this possible?

(I originally posted this in Mod Talk and it was suggested that I post it here too. "Amazing Follower Tweaks" was recommended as a way to coordinate your allies' actions and "Move It Dammit" was recommended to avoid congestion in hallways.)

[underthesky]

One suggestion for an existing command-your-army style mod (haven't tried it myself): Mixed Unit Tactics (some other mods by the same other might also be interesting for you)