My main fort is Sutvaka, and I spend a lot of time in managing the many guards and followers I have there. I build in this running career the Hearthfire Home at Windstad (was it Windstad? I always mess up those names), and have another group of followers there. Recently I added a mod that slowly builds a huge mining complex very close to it, with even more NPCs and some guards there. I used a mod for establishing that wonderful little blockhouse and fishing quay plus watchtower at that lake southwest of Riverwood, another mod repaired one of the broken homes near the magicans' academy, and recently I added Stonespire Castle west of Dragonbridge. I run an army of around 30 followers that via AFT are in constant service for me. :)

Some homes from former careers are still there, because they look so nice, but I do not use them anymore. Sutvaka and Windstad Manor are my primary places. Two kids in Breezehome, however. Key to handle little monsters is to keep them at a distance. :smug:

Try having SIX. :O: :dead: I always felt sorry for the ones I couldn't adopt so I use an adoption mod that ups the number to six, but I don't think it adds any extra orphans to the game so at least I can get the truly homeless ones from Hearthfire off the streets and still have room for a couple more. I usually take at least one from the orphanage just to clear the quest that pops up for it.

It really IS better to keep them tucked away in some nice warm home you rarely visit, though. So far my preferred place for that has been Heljarchen, the HF estate in Dawnstar. I like its central location and nearness to Whiterun, which when all is said and done usually ends up being my primary "city" residence. I tried making Windhelm my primary location and wish I could be happy with that but the location is just too remote. It's still my favorite house and the one I find easiest to mod for what I want without turning it into an obvious Nord Tardis that is WAY bigger on the inside.

The kids will usually live either in Whiterun or Heljarchen, once I have them, depending on the state of the civil war. I wouldn't want them living some place that is going to be coming under fire... also with Civil War Overhaul installed just moving around without drawing aggro in enemy territory is impossible unless you're disguised, so I kinda have to keep the kids in friendly territory if I have them when I start that questline. I've had them living in Honeyside for a bit when that was my only friendly option, but it's not a longterm solution IMO.

I could never have the kids live in Winstad, Hjaalmarch and that whole swamp area is just too creepy for me. The place in Falkreath isn't bad even though that's not my favorite hold either, but it is a bit more accessible. It's just such a cramped area up on that ridge where it sits. And I really do prefer the wide open spaces around Whiterun, I just wish the weather at Heljarchen was as temperate as it is down around the city.

Honestly I think I've played Skyrim too long and know too much, because when I'm in the game and start a family the list of places I'm *willing* to have them live is very, very small. Solitude? No. I don't like it up there, and only go there when I have to or it's the most convenient stopover on a current excursion. (Plus the house is so expensive it's often the last one I get.) Riften? I don't mind it, but it's not a place I'd want to raise kids, too much shady stuff going on there. Windhelm would be fine if not for the out of the way location. Hjaalmarch - no. Falkreath - meh. Markarth - OH GODS NO. :haha:

Doesn't leave much, and I really don't care for the mods that add new homes/manors/estates, I've tried a few and they just clutter up the landscape IMO. Lately I've been in the habit of removing mods that add stuff that I feel just crowds up the environment, I ditched Interesting NPCs for that reason, although it was wonderfully done and some of the people and quests it added were very cool. However it added so many NPCs in so many places that I felt *should* have been left alone, or that broke my immersion just a little too much.

I finally finished installing everything from STEP the other day, and surprisingly it didn't explode or melt my system. :o :doh:

EDIT: I didn't install this mod though...tempting as it was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTKhOvBNakM

STEP? Is that a particular modder? Or site for mods?

Now I've got the bug to get back into the game again, currently going through mod list and making some of the changes I noticed I wanted in the last playthrough... also decided to step things up with a couple of my own mods, I'd done one that made it possible to get into Snow Veil Sanctum through the "back door" and go as far as the word wall, so it was no longer questlocked. Moved all references to the relevant TG quest out of the cell so nothing was triggered by going in there. Obviously a mod for characters that will never join the TG, which is basically all of mine at this point. :O:

Anyway I've now changed the mod to unlock all of Snow Veil Sanctum, and allow followers in, so it should be possible to go through the whole dungeon without ever joining the TG or breaking the game if I haven't. I hate major locations being locked like that now that I've done the TG and am unlikely to do it again.

Now trying to do the same thing with Brinewater Grotto, removing the TG triggers and quest-related stuff and making the start of the area accessible from outside the East Empire Warehouse. Although I'm thinking of making it locked and putting the key somewhere that would require my character to earn it. Not sure how that's going to work out, but we'll see.

Other things on my to-do list are figuring out a way to make certain irritating NPCs either go away or shut the hell up, most notably the constantly force-greeting Vigilant in Markarth outside the Abandoned House. I'VE TOLD YOU I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING TYRANNUS NOW LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!! Gawds what a tool. I usually just disable him with the console but it would be nice to have him still in the game just in case, even if the only reason to do that quest is to flip off Molag Bal by deliberately failing it. :D I'd just like to have the option to bring it up with him myself after one convo, instead of constantly fending him off when all I want to do is get my other business done in the city. :stare:

There is also a certain Argonian in Solitude who keeps bothering me every time I'm trying to sell my loot to the merchants...STFU I'm not interested!:/\\!!

Yes, he's also on my list, altho not as much of a priority because he doesn't force greet the player and with The Choice Is Yours mod already in the game, you don't get stuck with any quests if you just ignore him.

However I'm still considering the possibility of getting him out of the way somehow. If you never talk to him he only has one line of dialogue and he NEVER stops saying it. I wish there was a way to talk to him once, decline his quest, and then report him to the guards so they'd take him off to jail.

I'm wondering if there's a way to flag his solicitation dialogue so he only says it under certain conditions, say having joined the Thieves Guild which would mean your character would be more likely to be interested in his scheme. :hmmm:

It's a collection of links to mods that should all work together.

http://wiki.step-project.com/Main_Page

I threw a couple of mods on top of it and aside from one slight screw-up, it's been behaving itself so far.

Interesting, I'll have to check it out! Thanks.

Well, Project 'Shut Up, Jaree-Ra' is underway, I just modded his idle dialogue so that he doesn't say any of it unless you've completed your first job for the Thieves Guild. Here's hoping it works as planned.

And now we'll work on Project 'Shut Up, Tyrannus' and see what we can do about that annoyance.

Should we be talking about TES 6?

I've heard things here and there that it's either

1) Deep into development
2) Just talk
3) A hoax

If nothing else, I think Skyrim was too big a success commercially for them not to go for TES 6. There is TES Online of course but I'd be willing to bet there's still a substantial part of TES fandom that has no interest in online/multiplayer gaming and that's easy money lost if they don't follow up with another single player game.

That said, I haven't yet played the Dragonborn DLC and still haven't even installed Morrowind and Oblivion, so I've got plenty of TES to keep me occupied for a long while yet. Hell, I could probably play Skyrim without any DLC at all for years to come given all the modding possibilities out there.

Some day I will get around to Skyrim when I have some time (a lot of time). But that will mean me modding the heck out of it first, like going through all the equipment and fixing its specs. Game designers generally don't know crap about weapons, so it is always one of the first things I will fix with any game I can). Also fixing houses, polishing mods (mods can be all over the place as far as quality), and tweaking what ever else needs it.

Thankfully at least with Skyrim/Fallout the above isn't too difficult with its full tools suite. Other games can take me weeks to a month or two.

Weapons, armor and player houses are really what end up taking most of my modding time. :yep: Especially since I like smithing, and a lot of the weapons/armor in unmodded Skyrim cannot be made and/or improved because the necessary crafting recipes were left out.

Especially annoying with some of the unique "reward" pieces that end up being less useful than something of much lesser base quality that however *can* be improved to a higher damage output by someone with a good smithing skill. Nothing beats finishing a major questline and getting some awesome looking, theoretically high end legendary axe that deals less damage than the basic no-name steel one you've been carrying around for 20 levels and improved out the wazoo. :shifty:

And I have to say I was really disappointed by the vanilla player homes, not so much with layout and size but with the fact that so often you find items and furniture wedged into places where they don't fit when it's so easy to just move them a smidge or two this way or that or, if all else fails, scale them down by a tiny percent. This turned out to be a real problem with the player homes added by Hearthfire, where almost every bit of static décor had to be moved or resized to avoid having it look like I was high on skooma when I built and furnished them.

Also some of the other choices they made with the player homes never make any sense to me, which is why they all get thoroughly renovated. Fortunately I've done it so many times now that the vanilla homes don't take me that long to get through even if I start them all over from scratch.

Ya I hear you. I often have problems with most of the base stats themselves on weapons (especially wear stats), and as you say a lot of the special weapons don't make sense stat wise at all (this is very common with Bethesda, its like they don't even line up the stats). In Fallout New Vegas I did a similar thing with crafting including making it so you could craft every single ammo type in the game (including all the ammo I added). Ditto with the player houses, not just fixing things, but adding things like lots of permanent storage (and removing any that was not permanent) so that I could sort out my collections of stuff (I usually end up with a copy of every thing in the game other than rubbish stuff, and crazy wealthy).

So ya when I have a lot of time, I will get around to this. Heck I still need to finish Fallout NV (and Oblivion).

I don't know much about stats (how much damage does a greatsword do compared to a short sword? I'm gonna go with "more," anything beyond that is best left up to someone else :O:) but yeah there were some odd things just within the context of the game, as in some types of armor being hyped lore-wise due to the abilities of the people who typically make it, but not having this reflected in the stats for it. Thankfully there are modders out there who addressed that sort of thing with big overhaul mods for the smithing/armor/weapons stuff. I start with those and then tweak them a bit get the stuff that suits me in particular into the game.

There's no "wear" on weapons in Skyrim, though, if you mean that weapons lose their edge or whatever. I think that may have been a change from earlier games. Whatever damage a weapon does, it does until you improve it to do more, it never does less because of actually using it. Which I'm sure is not realistic, but thank goodness for it because I spend enough time at the forge and grindstone as it is. One think I've learned from Skyrim is that I am congenitally incapable of not smithing if smithing is at all possible. :D

Lol I went through a stage where I modded in special displays and storage options for just about every unique or collectible item in the game, and then I realized that I was spending most of my playing time trying to get this or that item so I could display it, when what I really wanted to do when I came home tired and aching from a week's adventuring was just dump everything in a chest and go to bed. :haha: I spent more time sorting stuff and hauling it from one place to another than I did questing.

Now I might make a few displays for special items that I almost always end up with, thankfully weapons and armor are easy because racks and mannequins are already in the game (altho getting female mannequins in the game took a little work) but I'll make sure I have one place with a big library to hold all the books and I dunno, I might do a couple special things for items related to the main quest, but other than that... well, I just put a lot of cupboards and chests in convenient places and dump stuff in them.