TESTING Faction Fixes SE (by acidzebra)

[TechAngel85]

Discussion topic:
Faction Fixes SE by acidzebra
Wiki Link

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[gamingsrc]

Have you ever tested this mod? or asked why the mod author closed the forum of discussion in nexus?
Well on my end I spent 12 hours of time to discover what it do.

[TechAngel85]

2 hours ago, gamingsrc said:

Have you ever tested this mod? or asked why the mod author closed the forum of discussion in nexus?
Well on my end I spent 12 hours of time to discover what it do.

I can say that I have seen more interesting interactions with fights after installing this. It basically just corrects the aggro and says who should attack who via factions.

[gamingsrc]

Honestly I was very enthusiastic about the mod.
Maybe it was my load order of mods that played against.

I'm going to redo the work and check my load of mods.

(It takes time because the mod conflict with other overhauls).

 

Edited October 5, 2022 by gamingsrc
Rethought soon after of what I did when I was tweaking.

[gamingsrc]

By the way, yesterday when I was tweaking I was thinking about 

VigilantOfStendarrFaction

Should they consider the DragonFaction as their enemy?

Or maybe Dragons is a new theme that don't belongs in the Books of the Vigilant of Stendarr.

(they talk about chasing others abominations...)

[TechAngel85]

2 hours ago, gamingsrc said:

By the way, yesterday when I was tweaking I was thinking about 

VigilantOfStendarrFaction

Should they consider the DragonFaction as their enemy?

Or maybe Dragons is a new theme that don't belongs in the Books of the Vigilant of Stendarr.

(they talk about chasing others abominations...)

Dragons are the enemy of everyone and everything, Cultist and Dragon Priest perhaps being an exception. This mod doesn't touch any animal or creature factions, though. 

[gamingsrc]

It's "Animal Tweaks" mod that is behind the bandit conflict I got yesterday.

Animal tweak mod tweak animal factions and do it in a good way.

 

But seriously Bethesda should not joke with the Game as they did with TES V.

Now they have Microsoft behind them I hope they do something more serious about Factions and gameplay in general.

[gamingsrc]

I strongly doubt there are a lot of people that tested thoroughly this mod.

 

For now I have recognized two issues:

 

1) Vampire Thrall Faction should be set at almost the same relationship as normal vampires.

A lot of vanilla quests are built for them to be agressive toward the player:

Haemar's Shame dungeon for DA03

Forebears' Holdout for DLC1VQ03Hunter

are two examples of dungeons showing that the vampire thrall should be agressive toward the player.

 

2) After the end of "DLC1HunterBaseIntro" (A New Order), most Dawnguard members becomes available as followers (Agmaer, Celann, Durak ... etc).

This is because they are already in the PotentialFollowerFaction and this faction mod make them friendly with the player. The two condition that in vanilla allow a NPC to becomes a follower.

 

There is a work around this, we can remove from PotentialFollowerFaction all dawnguard members that are in vanilla in it, then add a quest or a trigger zone so that they are added to PotentialFollowerFaction at the end of the main DG quest.

Edited November 21, 2022 by gamingsrc
Spelling.

[TechAngel85]

2 hours ago, gamingsrc said:

I strongly doubt there are a lot of people that tested thoroughly this mod.

 

For now I have recognized two issues:

 

1) Vampire Thrall Faction should be set at almost the same relationship as normal vampires.

A lot of vanilla quests are built for them to be agressive toward the player:

Haemar's Shame dungeon for DA03

Forebears' Holdout for DLC1VQ03Hunter

are two examples of dungeons showing that the vampire thrall should be agressive toward the player.

 

2) After the end of "DLC1HunterBaseIntro" (A New Order), most Dawnguard members becomes available as followers (Agmaer, Celann, Durak ... etc).

This is because they are already in the PotentialFollowerFaction and this faction mod make them friendly with the player. The two condition that in vanilla allow a NPC to becomes a follower.

 

There is a work around this, we can remove from PotentialFollowerFaction all dawnguard members that are in vanilla in it, then add a quest or a trigger zone so that they are added to PotentialFollowerFaction at the end of the main DG quest.

As far as I can tell, none of the enemies for #1 are required to complete the areas. So it's just altering play style a bit. It makes sense that if you're a part of the Vampire faction that you wouldn't be attacked by other members of that faction. If I'm wrong about level progression, here, please let me know.

As for #2...if you're a vampire, you really shouldn't be messing with the Dawnguard. Again, this sounds like another change in play style. This one, you could bring to the author's attention.

[gamingsrc]

For point 1, the game was set so that the vampire thrall should be hostile to player faction in most situations. I refrained from changing their relationship following the same philosophy as you said, but it evolved to some situations in dungeons where you ask "why are all these vampire thralls there, their presence is pointless?".

 

There should do an advanced mechanic to controle the thralls, the game don't have it. Bethesda set them to "very aggressive" (as bandits) so simplify things.

 

As for the point 2, I strongly apologize (I'm getting caught by some amnesia lol), it's a vanilla behavior as pointed by these pages:

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Durak

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Celann

etc.

 

[DoubleYou]

I did a playthrough with it and noticed no issues with this. I can see your argument for Haemar's Shame, where the Daedric lord talks about how you put the vampires "out of their misery." Since the pup is there, I would expect this not to be much of an issue, as I would expect him to kill the vampires anyhow.

[TheOtherGrey]

This mod makes joining the Volkihar Vampires in the Dawnguard quest line intolerable. Guards and the Companions will turn hostile on sight, once the PC is added to the faction 'DLC1VampireFaction'. This is usually the case at the start of the quest 'Prophet':

I've created a fresh MO2 profile and started a new game with the bare minimum of mods activated: the mod itself (which has USSEP as a master) and Live Another Life (to start the game as a Volkihar Vampire). I still needed to add the player to the faction via the console. Guards were immediately hostile.

I've tried fixing the mod in xEdit (by changing all entries listing DLC1VampireFaction as 'Enemy' to 'Neutral'), but faction information seems to be baked into the save, so it only works on a new game.

I've even created a small mod running a script, but while Faction.GetReaction and the console function GetFactionReaction report the correct value (0.0), NPCs behave as though the baked-in value (1.0) is still active:

Scriptname FixFactionFixesScript extends Quest  

Faction property GuardFaction auto
Faction property ImperialsFaction auto
Faction property StormcloaksFaction auto
Faction property VolkiharVampiresFaction auto
Int relationship = -1

event onInit()

  Self.resetFactionRelations()
  Self.stop()

endEvent


function resetFactionRelations()

  GuardFaction.setReaction(VolkiharVampiresFaction, 0)
  relationship = GuardFaction.getReaction(VolkiharVampiresFaction)
  Debug.Trace("GuardFaction to VolkiharVampiresFaction is now " + relationship)

  ImperialsFaction.setReaction(VolkiharVampiresFaction, 0)
  relationship = ImperialsFaction.getReaction(VolkiharVampiresFaction)
  Debug.Trace("ImperialsFaction to VolkiharVampiresFaction is now " + relationship)

  StormcloaksFaction.setReaction(VolkiharVampiresFaction, 0)
  relationship = StormcloaksFaction.getReaction(VolkiharVampiresFaction)
  Debug.Trace("StormcloaksFaction to VolkiharVampiresFaction is now " + relationship)

endFunction

I strongly recommend that this mod be removed from the guide until it is fixed. The fix is trivial, of course, but requires a new game. Having gone down the rabbit hole of trying to fix faction relations after the fact... I'd prefer mods didn't touch existing faction relations. I will not be installing this mod on my next playthrough, even if this issue is fixed.

Unfortunately, I'm quite invested into my current playthrough, so this was very disappointing. The workaround I've found is to add the player to a faction with friendly relations to CWImperialFaction and CWSonsFaction. I'm using CWImperialAlly and CWSonsAlly. Should work with the Companions, too (using SilverHandFactionPacified), but I have yet to confirm that.

[Mousetick]

2 hours ago, TheOtherGrey said:

I strongly recommend that this mod be removed from the guide until it is fixed. The fix is trivial, of course, but requires a new game. Having gone down the rabbit hole of trying to fix faction relations after the fact... I'd prefer mods didn't touch existing faction relations. I will not be installing this mod on my next playthrough, even if this issue is fixed.

Yes, that's a serious problem. I guess not many STEP users join the Volkihar faction for this to be discovered only now.

Even with the fixes, this mod would remain quite finicky: it is not well suited for a base build on top of which users may add other mods, without careful manual patching. Other mods may assume vanilla faction relations, or other mods may modify the aggressiveness of NPCs, producing unexpected behavior that's very hard to track down for normal users. 

[ButchDiavolo]

1 hour ago, Mousetick said:

Yes, that's a serious problem. I guess not many STEP users join the Volkihar faction for this to be discovered only now.

Even with the fixes, this mod would remain quite finicky: it is not well suited for a base build on top of which users may add other mods, without careful manual patching. Other mods may assume vanilla faction relations, or other mods may modify the aggressiveness of NPCs, producing unexpected behavior that's very hard to track down for normal users. 

This is exactly why I never installed this mod.

[z929669]

I honestly never tested this mod at the time it was added back in something like 2018(9), because I wasn't on SSE guide dev back then. and I also don't see any testing data on this one from our side.

I'm in favor of dropping it from the historic user feedback.