2023-06-14 - After cleaning up old comments and obsolete forums threads.
HOWTO mq302test: setstage mq302test {1..9} triggers a hold ownership change (to imperials) setstage mq302test 200 changes the above for (to stormcloaks) setstage mq302test 100 changes the above back (to imperials)
Avoid spamming these commands. If it does not work at all, it could be broken and you'll need to load an earlier savegame. Note that a hold flips over only after you travel far away from the hold.
Plans for version 2.9.0
Presumably after some incremental updates 2.8.x, in no particular order
* Support for using OCW in a mod collection
- a power-user configuration, for things such as - limiting enemy invasions, limiting options to suggest faction general other holds - per-hold disabling hold battles - some option for OCW initialization after battle of Whiterun, even if player did not read the description book
- a book "Open Civil War description" placed next to the important war tables. Player character needs to reads it to activate OCW at war map. More than the vanilla "Map updated" notification. The text is tailored, depending on this power-user config.
* Support for interoperability with mods
- map flag colors updates for other fort takeovers
- support for add-ons adding new civil war missions similar to vanilla missions, such as - using allies (like, CWAllies showing up also in minor hold battles) - recognizing extra missions in calculating OCW wargame bonus
* Fixes and robustness - more or less the following:
- handling the bug involving setting a CWOwner value to 0 - resuming civil war after player returns from Sovngarde and MQ306 fails to start due to killing Delphine whatever reason - some issue fixed in 2.7.1 (on Skyrim classic) about missing enemy camp commanders - detecting which alias failed to fill - at least for hold battle quests. - maybe something about the rare bug of stuck-up cwresetgarrison{1...9} pipeline - disable during hold battles some NPCs and/or clutter if needed to make up for increased memory usage - keep the Markarth stables dog out of battle; prevent Inigo not running back to his Riften jail cell. - teleport Rikke/Galmar to the military camp
* Fluff and stuff - not all of this need to be in 2.9.0
- Tullius / Ulfric showing up in some battles (some way to keep the OCW dialogue option that asks the general to visit field camps...) - more actual soldiers in battles / battle formations in hold battles - more player character pre-battle speech (OCW have that in Riften/Markath battles already, won't need new voice lines because it is all PC dialogue) - more dialogue in civil war, e.g. reusing combat barks that are only used during main quest - voice splicing, there are some odd unused lines (e.g. Galmar has Windhelm guards lines from Blood In the Ice) - shortened jarls' banter scenes on repeated battles in the same hold - integrate some lines of cut content dialogue CWEscapeCity in battle of Whiterun Dragonsreach scene - minor flow changes (such as enemy not invading the same hold twice in a row) - handling Season Unending MQ302 (possibly with no changes in MQ302 but rather with a fake lore book that justifies why they demand Riften and Markarth, even though they own them already - a nod to Crusader's King's "de iure / de facto" system)
* Battle Quarter-pounder with Cheese
Something like this: when the player side gains 7 hold (out of 9), 3 (out of these 7) holds turn "neutral". The enemy will target them least likely. Possibly they'll use hold guards garrisons; certainly, the war map will show this. Mechanically, this confines the OCW part of the war from 6 holds that can change ownership to half of that (hence the name). And a fake lore book or a letter to explain what's going on.
- non-goal: supporting losing Whiterun hold later on (not during the first battle of Whiterun) - Whiterun hold is one of these "neutral" holds
Pretty much everything is different, except they both use the (cut content) hold capital city battles.
OCW does it with fewer changes, so as to be compatible with more mods. For example, the quest Season Unending is not touched at all. The army soldiers levels and equipment is not altered at all (there were separate mods for that already when making OCW). The final hold campaign is left pretty much intact, except for some bugfixes. So is the battle of Whiterun. If you have a mod like Skyrim At War (that makes changes within the battle of Whiterun), it works with OCW with no compatibility patch required.
Another difference is that OCW plays out some sort of war simulation in the background - the enemy periodically invades your holds and that's when the defense battles occur. CWO puts you on the defense battle track only after you lose an attack battle. Also, CWO counts how many soldiers of both sides fell in a battle, if you pass out by losing health the battle is won or lost based on that, and also this "murder score" is used in computing next battle odds somehow. In OCW with no other mods it's game over if you die in battle. The only relevant battle result is which side won it. The battle odds are derived from that background war simulation. So I guess CWO may be more suitable for the type of a player character who is a front-line fighter, while OCW is viable even for a stealth archer
Some differences are intended to alleviate civil war bugs. By default in OCW fort battles (except for the final hold) are optional, so if there's a bug with a fort battle, the workaround is to avoid it. Likewise, if the bug is with the city battle, the workaround is to win the fort battle (when in Wargamer mode, they revert to the vanilla behavior of conquering the hold). If both battles glitch out, you can attempt as the workaround the "offscreen" battle resolution.
OCW also leans on the side on restoring cut content battles as it was left shipped by Bethesda, warts and all. So you'll have Rikke and Galmar leading the assaults on Riften and Markarth in OCW, while in CWO you have Tullius and Ulfric leading the soldiers there. Or that there are civilians fighting in the battle of Markarth. Or that there is no civil war music like in CWO, only regular battle music. Some of those are due to my decision of not changing the big civil war scripts (cwscript.pex, qf_cwbattle... or whatever it is called), in hope that other mods could experiment tweaking them. So, by now it might be overridden by addons such as Enodoc's Serious Civil War Defenses.
Last but not least, there are a few genuine OCW features, in the free spirit of modding.
- in major hold city battles, you can bypass the usual speech of Rikke and Galmar (you can say that speech yourself, yay!).
- there are "siege relief battles" of Windhelm/Solitude (your faction capital), that are made from the cut content defense battles. Unlike defense battles, you start them outside the battle perimeter. You lead a squad of city guards from Kynesgrove/Dragonbridge. You won't lose the civil war in these battles. They are an option only when the enemy faction conquers some adjacent holds, and if you win, it weakens the enemy forces in these holds.
- the Markarth battleground heavily favors defenders, so to balance that the catapult explosions randomly fall on the battle place (just behind that first defense wall)
- in minor hold city battles, there's a random chance that the enemy soldiers are hidden. As you approach to investigate, they either spawn to ambush you, or you learn that they all left to invade another hold
- civil war missions in holds (False Front, Rescue from Fort ..., Compelling Tribute) are optional, but they increase your battle odds bonus, each mission is equivalent to one rank of a civil war promotion. The enemy battle odds bonus is fixed (it is the OCW difficulty). Each bonus point is randomly 2-5 soldiers in the battle respawns. So it is crucial to winning the civil war if you use only offscreen battles. Or don't engage in the battles. If your personal contribution in a battle is less than a dozen casualties, the outcome often is similar to the offscreen battle. Though you never know how the battle will play out in the Skyrim engine.
Still, as a thought experiment, suppose you wanted to win the OCW civil war using offscreen battles only, depending on the OCW difficulty it comes off as - a cakewalk; - a strategy game challenge (on Standard mode) or a brief trial-and-error (on Fortuna mode) - a grind for those missions while the enemy faction overruns your hold, then hunting for a lucky break invading enemy starting holds in hope to get civil war promotions, and after that a counter offensive, likely started with the capital siege relief...
Okay I digress - iirc you only get civil war promotions for winning live battles (the offscreen battles victory is equivalent to the Season Unending diplomatic hold switcheroos). All things considered, it's the biggest difference, CWO won't have it even if it will be CWO Redux Redux Redux.
Please help, I finished jagged crown and battle of whiterun quest. then I finished season unending where the stormcloaks got winterhold, markarth and morthal in exchange for rift. then i try to report to tullius, no "let me suggest (commander) dialogue option or the "what's next?" option.
Never mind, I did some little underhanded tactics to fix it. So I saved outside Castle Dour and deactivated this mod, then installed Civil War Overhaul and then went back inside to Castle Dour to find General Tullius. Then I tweaked the CWO MCM by forcing a campaign to the Reach or somethin. Then talked to Tullius, I can finally asked, "What's next?" After receiving the rank, I exited Castle Dour and saved the game. Then enabled Open Civil War again and disabled CWO, go back to Castle Dour, now I can ask, "Let me suggest, (Commander)"
captured reach should be windhelm final battle now but tullius tells me to gain rift even tho i already did that i captured it again and then he tells me to gain the rift again a third time.
I haven’t touched a single Civil War related quest and now I’ve started Season Unending.
from what I understand, that’s supposed to block the civil war until the main story is over, but when I go to deliver the messages to Tullius and Sulfuric, I still get an option to enlist with them. Out of curiosity I picked up the legion quest, and tullius won’t speak to me about the treaty (or anything) until completing that quest.
now out of curiosity, is that how it’s supposed to work? If I want to, can I take this opportunity to join the Legion and do their storyline, or will it break the mod/quest somehow?
Does this mod increase the lvl of the enemies? I am pkaying the vanilla civil war at lvl 47 and it is really annoying that every ebemy in the CW batle is lvl 11...
HAHAH believe it or not I am already using that exact same mod...I ended up finding it by my own...and it is amazing, the only battle that I did not see higher lvl enemies was in the last one when u are invading the city to kill Ulfric/Tulius
Must have been some other mod that lifted her essential status.
As for your question, "No Pemerment Essentials" (from Skyrim Classic) does that, after TG questline.
I guess in that case the civil war questline still works, but the jarl exchange scene in Riften's palace could be a bit unilateral, so to speak, with the replacement jarl not saying anything
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HOWTO mq302test:
setstage mq302test {1..9} triggers a hold ownership change (to imperials)
setstage mq302test 200 changes the above for (to stormcloaks)
setstage mq302test 100 changes the above back (to imperials)
1-Solitude 6-Dawnstar 7-Winterhold
3-Morthal 4-Whiterun 8-Windhelm
2-Markarth 5-Falkreath 9-Riften
Avoid spamming these commands. If it does not work at all, it could be broken and you'll need to load an earlier savegame. Note that a hold flips over only after you travel far away from the hold.
Plans for version 2.9.0
Presumably after some incremental updates 2.8.x, in no particular order
* Support for using OCW in a mod collection
- a power-user configuration, for things such as
- limiting enemy invasions, limiting options to suggest faction general other holds
- per-hold disabling hold battles
- some option for OCW initialization after battle of Whiterun, even if player did not read the description book
- a book "Open Civil War description" placed next to the important war tables. Player character needs to reads it to activate OCW at war map. More than the vanilla "Map updated" notification. The text is tailored, depending on this power-user config.
* Support for interoperability with mods
- map flag colors updates for other fort takeovers
- support for add-ons adding new civil war missions similar to vanilla missions, such as
- using allies (like, CWAllies showing up also in minor hold battles)
- recognizing extra missions in calculating OCW wargame bonus
* Fixes and robustness - more or less the following:
- handling the bug involving setting a CWOwner value to 0
- resuming civil war after player returns from Sovngarde and MQ306 fails to start due to
killing Delphinewhatever reason- some issue fixed in 2.7.1 (on Skyrim classic) about missing enemy camp commanders
- detecting which alias failed to fill - at least for hold battle quests.
- maybe something about the rare bug of stuck-up cwresetgarrison{1...9} pipeline
- disable during hold battles some NPCs and/or clutter if needed to make up for increased memory usage
- keep the Markarth stables dog out of battle; prevent Inigo not running back to his Riften jail cell.
- teleport Rikke/Galmar to the military camp
* Fluff and stuff - not all of this need to be in 2.9.0
- Tullius / Ulfric showing up in some battles (some way to keep the OCW dialogue option that asks the general to visit field camps...)
- more actual soldiers in battles / battle formations in hold battles
- more player character pre-battle speech (OCW have that in Riften/Markath battles already, won't need new voice lines because it is all PC dialogue)
- more dialogue in civil war, e.g. reusing combat barks that are only used during main quest
- voice splicing, there are some odd unused lines (e.g. Galmar has Windhelm guards lines from Blood In the Ice)
- shortened jarls' banter scenes on repeated battles in the same hold
- integrate some lines of cut content dialogue CWEscapeCity in battle of Whiterun Dragonsreach scene
- minor flow changes (such as enemy not invading the same hold twice in a row)
- handling Season Unending MQ302 (possibly with no changes in MQ302 but rather with a fake lore book that justifies why they demand Riften and Markarth, even though they own them already - a nod to Crusader's King's "de iure / de facto" system)
* Battle Quarter-pounder with Cheese
Something like this: when the player side gains 7 hold (out of 9), 3 (out of these 7) holds turn "neutral". The enemy will target them least likely. Possibly they'll use hold guards garrisons; certainly, the war map will show this. Mechanically, this confines the OCW part of the war from 6 holds that can change ownership to half of that (hence the name). And a fake lore book or a letter to explain what's going on.
- non-goal: supporting losing Whiterun hold later on (not during the first battle of Whiterun) - Whiterun hold is one of these "neutral" holds
OCW does it with fewer changes, so as to be compatible with more mods. For example, the quest Season Unending is not touched at all. The army soldiers levels and equipment is not altered at all (there were separate mods for that already when making OCW). The final hold campaign is left pretty much intact, except for some bugfixes. So is the battle of Whiterun. If you have a mod like Skyrim At War (that makes changes within the battle of Whiterun), it works with OCW with no compatibility patch required.
Another difference is that OCW plays out some sort of war simulation in the background - the enemy periodically invades your holds and that's when the defense battles occur. CWO puts you on the defense battle track only after you lose an attack battle. Also, CWO counts how many soldiers of both sides fell in a battle, if you pass out by losing health the battle is won or lost based on that, and also this "murder score" is used in computing next battle odds somehow. In OCW with no other mods it's game over if you die in battle. The only relevant battle result is which side won it. The battle odds are derived from that background war simulation. So I guess CWO may be more suitable for the type of a player character who is a front-line fighter, while OCW is viable even for a stealth archer
Some differences are intended to alleviate civil war bugs. By default in OCW fort battles (except for the final hold) are optional, so if there's a bug with a fort battle, the workaround is to avoid it. Likewise, if the bug is with the city battle, the workaround is to win the fort battle (when in Wargamer mode, they revert to the vanilla behavior of conquering the hold). If both battles glitch out, you can attempt as the workaround the "offscreen" battle resolution.
OCW also leans on the side on restoring cut content battles as it was left shipped by Bethesda, warts and all. So you'll have Rikke and Galmar leading the assaults on Riften and Markarth in OCW, while in CWO you have Tullius and Ulfric leading the soldiers there. Or that there are civilians fighting in the battle of Markarth. Or that there is no civil war music like in CWO, only regular battle music. Some of those are due to my decision of not changing the big civil war scripts (cwscript.pex, qf_cwbattle... or whatever it is called), in hope that other mods could experiment tweaking them. So, by now it might be overridden by addons such as Enodoc's Serious Civil War Defenses.
Last but not least, there are a few genuine OCW features, in the free spirit of modding.
- in major hold city battles, you can bypass the usual speech of Rikke and Galmar (you can say that speech yourself, yay!).
- there are "siege relief battles" of Windhelm/Solitude (your faction capital), that are made from the cut content defense battles. Unlike defense battles, you start them outside the battle perimeter. You lead a squad of city guards from Kynesgrove/Dragonbridge. You won't lose the civil war in these battles. They are an option only when the enemy faction conquers some adjacent holds, and if you win, it weakens the enemy forces in these holds.
- the Markarth battleground heavily favors defenders, so to balance that the catapult explosions randomly fall on the battle place (just behind that first defense wall)
- in minor hold city battles, there's a random chance that the enemy soldiers are hidden. As you approach to investigate, they either spawn to ambush you, or you learn that they all left to invade another hold
- civil war missions in holds (False Front, Rescue from Fort ..., Compelling Tribute) are optional, but they increase your battle odds bonus, each mission is equivalent to one rank of a civil war promotion. The enemy battle odds bonus is fixed (it is the OCW difficulty). Each bonus point is randomly 2-5 soldiers in the battle respawns. So it is crucial to winning the civil war if you use only offscreen battles. Or don't engage in the battles. If your personal contribution in a battle is less than a dozen casualties, the outcome often is similar to the offscreen battle. Though you never know how the battle will play out in the Skyrim engine.
Still, as a thought experiment, suppose you wanted to win the OCW civil war using offscreen battles only, depending on the OCW difficulty it comes off as
- a cakewalk;
- a strategy game challenge (on Standard mode) or a brief trial-and-error (on Fortuna mode)
- a grind for those missions while the enemy faction overruns your hold, then hunting for a lucky break invading enemy starting holds in hope to get civil war promotions, and after that a counter offensive, likely started with the capital siege relief...
Okay I digress - iirc you only get civil war promotions for winning live battles (the offscreen battles victory is equivalent to the Season Unending diplomatic hold switcheroos). All things considered, it's the biggest difference, CWO won't have it even if it will be CWO Redux Redux Redux.
After that, no more bugs.
from what I understand, that’s supposed to block the civil war until the main story is over, but when I go to deliver the messages to Tullius and Sulfuric, I still get an option to enlist with them. Out of curiosity I picked up the legion quest, and tullius won’t speak to me about the treaty (or anything) until completing that quest.
now out of curiosity, is that how it’s supposed to work? If I want to, can I take this opportunity to join the Legion and do their storyline, or will it break the mod/quest somehow?
Thanks for your mod
As for your question, "No Pemerment Essentials" (from Skyrim Classic) does that, after TG questline.
I guess in that case the civil war questline still works, but the jarl exchange scene in Riften's palace could be a bit unilateral, so to speak, with the replacement jarl not saying anything