How to un-level actors?

[NanakoMagojiro]

Hi everyone. I'm not too familiar with how levelled lists work, so i'm asking for a little advice.

 

In short, what i'd like to do is make certain actors not level with the player (town guards), and instead be locked at one flat level (say... lv15)

I've been poking around in the construction set trying to do this, starting with the windhelm guards. Each guard i found was a nearly un-editable modification of some base actor, and that base actor was a mod of another base actor. etc, etc. I traced the chain back to a levelled character, i think it was LCharGuardSons and kind of hit a wall there. It seemed to be a list of guards all at lv1, and i couldn't really figure out how the whole levelling aspect of them worked.

 

If it's not possible to specifically lock guards at a certain level, is it possible to cap them? like having them level with the player until lv15 and stop, falling behind from then on ?

 

any info on the subject is appreciated

[kromey]

Have you seen the wiki page on the topic?

http://www.creationkit.com/LeveledCharacter

That should help you better understand that LCharGuardSons object.

 

Coming back to your question, there's two ways to accomplish this:

Find the actor of the level you want in the leveled list, and replace all references of the leveled list with references of this actor instead. For example, if the leveled list has level 4, 8, 12, and 16 actors, pick the one you want to use (either 16, being the closest, or 12, being the closest without going over) and then use that one everywhere the leveled actor appears. This tutorial section may be helpful for you, although it doesn't go into much detail.

 

Alternatively, you can set the Min and Max Levels of the relevant Encounter Zone to narrow down the leveled list to a smaller range, or to simply cap it at 15, or what-have-you. This is a lot easier, but it will not work if there are other leveled lists in use in the zone that you don't want fixed/capped as this approach affects all leveled lists in the zone (in the case of towns, I believe the available goods for purchase from at least some merchants are based on leveled lists, so if you capped the zone at 15 you wouldn't see any of the higher-level stuff for sale here at all).

Edited January 7, 2013 by kromey

[ripple]

The encounter zone method is not ideal for this purpose. It's more suited to changing the level scaling of mobs and containers. There is a third way, which is much easier and is actually the cleanest method if you just want to set the level of town guards without messing with individual guard records in the leveled lists (which increases the chance of generating conflicts, and is time consuming).

 

With the exception of unique named guard NPCs, the stats of all generic town guard NPCs are based on templates (this includes legion soldiers and stormcloaks). If you change a template, all of the NPCs whose stats are based on the template will be altered accordingly. There are different guard templates for different cities/factions (Whiterun, Riften, Winterhold, Solitude Imperial, Solitude Sons of Skyrim), but not all settlements have different templates (some settlements, mostly the smaller settlements, share guard templates with the larger ones). Imperial Legion and Stormcloaks are governed by different templates so changes to one will not affect the other.

 

In my own personal NPC edits, I've set the town guards to be static level 20, Imperial Legion soldiers to scale from level 20 - 40, Sons of Skyrim to scale from 1 - 40, and Thalmoor soldiers to scale from level 20 - 50. There are maybe half a dozen guard templates, and probably about 20 templates in total if you included all the NPCs I mentioned above. It's much, much less time consuming than editing the individual leveled lists through which they are spawned.

Edited January 7, 2013 by ripple