Simply Balanced

Lightweight. compatible. Customizable features include balancing options for weapons, magic, potions and poisons, skills, enemy types and experience gained.

Why simple balance is needed

While other balance tools exist, they generally fall into one of two categories: either too broad or playing with every variable in the game, lacking focus, being overburdened, and causing compatibility issues. Or they are so small and uncustomizable that you would need several of them to achieve your goals, assuming such a constellation even exists. I think the middle ground is missing, which is a comprehensive but streamlined tool with clear responsibilities.

Simple Balance is my attempt to fill that gap. It comes with a well-structured MCM menu that focuses on combat and skills, is as compatible as you can possibly get, and also offers some exclusive features. Additionally, it works particularly well with my other mod, True Armor, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in immersive gameplay and realistic, in-depth combat.

feature

Everything you need to balance your combat experience

Adjustments to damage dealt and taken, including multiple variations, skills, experience points and more

Focus and streamline

Well-structured MCM menu to easily find what you need

plug and play

All options can be turned on and off as needed, remaining options selected as needed

Stack everything

With one exception (which overcomes the difficulty of the vanilla game), everything else stacks up well with other mods

Compatible with everything

Works with almost anything and never produces unexpected behavior, bugs or crashes

Working principle

Why "Simple Balance" is so compatible and safe

This mod is simply an accumulation of perks that can be dynamically added and removed from the player. That's great, because perks are nearly impossible to bug and naturally stack with other perks, spells, game settings, whatever you want. The only effect of not using perks is overcoming a game difficulty (novice, apprentice, skilled,...) which does not stack with other mods, but does not cause conflicts either. When multiple mods change these values, only the last change is applied.

However, reliance on privileges does have some limitations. Most notably, the changes can only be applied to player characters. This means that changes to "Simple Balance" will only affect player combat, not follower skills, player skills, not NPCs, etc.

Weapon balance:

This is a unique feature of Simple Balance. It reduces the damage difference between high and low level weapons, thus increasing the range of viable weapons. This makes defeating weaker enemies easier and more realistic. If the thing sticking out of you is made of steel instead of glass, why does it hurt so little?

The balanced weapon damage is calculated as follows: weapon damage * retained damage + (1 - retained damage) * balanced target

Just move it towards the target value.

One should be aware of some disadvantages of this approach: it also reduces the impact of backfire and reduces the efficiency of other power attack multipliers. Due to the revitalization system, these are severe restrictions. Of course, like with everything else, there's no harm in just testing it, you can always completely and safely disable it again and everything will be as before.

Darkness detection:

Another unique feature of Simple Balance. Darkness detection is simply a multiple of the enemy's detection range, which scales with the amount of light around you. My main purpose for creating these settings was to work with darker nighttime mods, as enemies often seem to spot you from ridiculous distances, even though it appears to be black. However, I don't just want to make sneaking easier only when it's really dark, which is what these settings are for.

Dark detection value is the biggest benefit you can get. For example, setting it to 50% will get you twice as close to what you would otherwise be able to achieve, but only if the charact …