Mod: Defenders of Cyrodiil 1_2 WIP
Game: TES IV: Oblivion
Requires: Shivering Isles
Author: David Brasher
Release Date: 3/20/11
************************************************************************
CONTENTS
************************************************************************
1. Information on the Mod
2. Installation
3. Version History
4. Conflicts, Known Issues, and Troubleshooting
5. Copy Status and Credits
************************************************************************
1. INFORMATION ON THE MOD
************************************************************************
This mod adds a faction of heroes to the game, who are dedicated to fighting against threats
to the Empire and its people. You can follow along with them and help them fight good-sized
multi-actor battles as they clear out dungeons.

I made this mod because I was dissatisfied with a mod I did debugging work on earlier:
Raiders of Cyrodiil Update at http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36664. That mod is big and
exciting, but too ambitious, and it overloads computers and causes CTDs with alarming frequency. I
was also dissatisfied with the lore, factions, structure, and workmanship. The joinable factions are
all evil, and I mainly just role-play good characters. But I really enjoyed the raiding in that mod.

So this mod features one joinable faction that is not evil. The target battle size has been
reduced to 7 on 7 maximum. In play-testing, the mod is very stable and does not cause CTDs above and
beyond the ordinary random Oblivion CTDs everyone has to live with. The main characters all have
custom silent dialog and AI packages so they are not so much like mute stage scenery that NPCs in
some mods are. In fact, practically all the characters in the faction have a function beyond being
scenery, whether it is as an ally when raiding a dungeon, as a questgiver, as a guard for headquarters,
or as a vender.

To start the mod, go to Defender Keep, an Imperial Legion fort north-east of Leyawiin, east
of the Nocturnal Shrine, and south of the Drunken Dragon Inn. Talk to the captain about joining the
faction and getting assigned a mission.

There are currently four quests. They are very highly-wrought. You might be surprised how
much labor was put in on AI packages, scripting, quest-coding and such, just to make four quests.

The structure of each raid is that you ask the captain for a mission, and he assigns you one
and tells you what time of day it will be at and where the troops are assembling at. The missions
usually start first thing in the morning and the troops assemble near the entrance to the dungeon. The
dungeons are close to Defender Keep.

There tends to be six allies that you go with when you raid a dungeon. One of them is the
captain who is an essential character. There is also usually a healer in the group who will periodically
automatically heal party members and who you can ask for healing.

These allies are not your "partners" like you find in many other mods or vanilla Oblivion
quests. You don't give them orders, because they, and you yourself, are under the command of the
captain and are in fact his partners. There are a few ways you can interact with them though:

(1) Chat. You can talk to them about what they think about the current mission or phase of the mission.
(2) Healing. If there is a healer in the party, you can ask to be healed. If you know healing spells,
you can heal party members who are injured so they don't die in the next assault.
(3) Equipment sharing. You can talk to them to enter the "Share" mode where you can inspect their
equipment, take things you need, give them better gear, give them healing potions, and take their gear
and repair it before giving it back.
(4) Stop allies from fighting among themselves. When you join the faction, you are given a spell to
cast to stop allies from fighting with each other. They usually start fighting each other because of
accidental blows during combat. When the enemies are dead, the good guys turn on each other. So it is
your duty to break up fights. Unfortunately, the spell is not 100% effective. It does indeed always stop
the fights, but if the characters hate each other badly enough, they might start fighting again almost
immediately.

This mod does not use CM partners, although a few features of this mod mimic it.

The progress of the raid is scheduled according to the time of day. There are invisible
waypoints set up in the dungeons. The actors fight their way to a particular waypoint at a certain
hour of the day and then pause and wait for the clock to tell them to proceed to the next waypoint.
Quest markers point to all the living members of the assault force, so you can keep track of what is
going on in the battle better and so you can know where you are supposed to be.

You are the most important factor in the battle. Things are balanced such that if you
sit out the battle and do not participate, practically all your allies will die. If you just sort of
coast along, probably half of your allies will die. If you use really good strategies, try really hard,
and have a little luck, you might be able to save all your comrades' lives.

It is assumed that you will just stay with the party and move when they move. That may not be
the best strategy though. When there is a pause and they are standing at a waypoint, you can rush on ahead
and kill as many enemies as possible to soften up the opposition for when they get there. Another approach
would be to run ahead and start a fight with one or two enemies, then run away and lead them back to the
assault force where the seven of you can gang up on them. Another approach would be to use the pause to
heal your allies, give them healing potions, give them better equipment, and repair their damaged equipment
for them. You might use a combination of these approaches, or find an even better approach on your own.

Movements always start at the top of the hour. A movement and the pause afterward usually last
2 hours, but sometimes a different time for a short movement or really long movement. So in a typical
example, if a raid starts at 8:00 AM, the people will fight their way to the first interior waypoint and
hang around there until 10:00 AM when they will fight their way to the next waypoint and stay there until
12:00 noon.

When victory conditions are met you will receive a quest update. You will need to find the
captain who is still in the dungeon and speak to him. He will order everyone back to headquarters. Speak
to him when you get back to headquarters and the quest will be closed out.

I am probably making it sound more complicated than it is. You don't really need to know this
stuff. There are quest updates, messages on your screen, dialog infos, and quest markers, so you can just
hop in and play the mod without reading the readme.

In this mod, you join a cash-strapped unit mainly just because you are a good guy and you want
to serve your country and fight evil. As the captain tells you when you enlist, you are paid with room and
board, healing, and loot. So you will want to be sure to pick up some valuable things while you are in the
dungeons. You will also be rewarded with fame as you complete quests.

There is a blacksmith in the basement of headquarters who sells and repairs armor and weapons.
He also recharges magical items and sells soul gems and potions and other things. He can be quite
useful for unloading your loot between missions, since Defender Keep is a long way from Leyawiin.

This mod is designated as a WIP for a couple of reasons. The first is because it only has four
quests so far and I am thinking of making more. The second reason is that quest mods (and indeed vanilla
Oblivion quests) are buggy. They are so elaborate, with so many little details that have to be perfect,
that no matter how many times you play-test them and no matter how many bugs you fix, there is probably
still a rare bug that only occurs under certain unusual conditions hiding somewhere in the quest.

But you don't need to be afraid of this mod. It is not a construction zone, and it is not a
buggy mess where you glance at it and the very first thing you see is a bug. The four quests are
complete and play-tested and debugged. New content added in the future will be new quests, so that the
mod will just get bigger.
************************************************************************
2. Installation
************************************************************************
Extract (decompress) the .esp file and texture to your Oblivion directory, the default is:
C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\
Mark the box next to the "Defenders of Cyrodiil" plugin.

Alternately, extract someplace else. Then move the esp. to Oblivion\Data.
************************************************************************
3. Version History
************************************************************************
V 1.2 3/20/11More mod-cleaning.
V 1.1 3/19/11Made it so allies who are guards can't arrest you for accidentally hitting
them in the heat of battle with enemies.
V 1.0 3/12/11Initial Release.
************************************************************************
4. Conflicts, Known Issues, and Troubleshooting
************************************************************************
The actor navigation AI in Oblivion is not perfect. Actors may ignore the path-gridding
for awhile or indefinitely. That is how Oblivion is. So you may see actors running into walls or
tables now and then. Your allies might lag behind and get lost when you leave a dungeon. But
Oblivion teleports lost actors back to where they need to be, so these actors will catch up with you
after awhile.

This mod would be best for medium to high-end computers because of the large number of
actors in one place, many of them with scripts and elaborate AI. For increased performance and
stability, leave your companions at home before starting this mod. On my machine, this mod is
stable and does not cause CTDs, but the testing was without companions so that the largest battles
would be 7 on 7 plus the summonings from both sides. If you bring a horde of companions, you could
get intolerable lag and stuttering or CTDs.

This mod places its new location in between two areas modded by Unique Landscape mods
so that it will not conflict with that mod series.

This mod will conflict with mods that edit the location of Defender Keep near Fieldhouse
Cave.

This mod uses duplicated interior dungeon cells and does not edit the vanilla Oblivion ones.
That means that if a quest in another mod or vanilla Oblivion happens to send you to that dungeon while
you are assigned a mission to that dungeon by this mod, you will not be able to get to the vanilla
Oblivion dungeon cell for that mod until you complete the mission for this mod.

Because this mod uses duplicate dungeon cells instead of modding the heck out of the
originals, the dungeons will be full of enemies again and will be slightly different next time you go back.
(Perhaps right after you cleared the dungeon and went back to headquarters.) So this will look kind of odd.
You just barely cleaned out the dungeon and it is full again! And all the treasure is still there!
(Except for the pile you left on the floor and came back to get. That treasure is gone.) So you should do
all your looting before you leave the dungeon, and then you should not come back, and just pretend that
the dungeon is still empty and that you are actually making progress toward killing all the monsters and
bad guys in Cyrodiil.

This mod needs more testing. If you locate a bug, contact David Brasher on TES Nexus
so that the situation can be examined so that the bug can hopefully be fixed.
************************************************************************
5. Copy Status and Credits
************************************************************************
Credits:
Bethesda for making the game in an open format anyone can mod.

Copy Status:
Public Domain with proper attribution and courtesy notification. Feel free to modify this,
share this, or use it in whole or in part in another mod.
************************************************************************
************************************************************************
************************************************************************
************************************************************************