what overhauls are balanced for multiple followers?

[lollers1]

I know requiem is one, but I don't think I even understand how complex that mod is even without sexlab. I like the way it delevels the whole world, and makes everyone die a lot faster though, plus the perk trees look like great fun. I don't want to go completely nuts with EFF and have a war band following me everywhere, something more like 2-3 followers would be fine

[ZeroListGram]

Revenge of the Enemies is said to be quite "imbalanced", which you may just fix with 2-3 essential followers. Ultimate Combat 3.0 gives quite a good AI for enemies, and according to a video, it even makes enemies work together (which I've yet to see, to be honest).

 

The alternative to Revenge of the Enemies would be Advanced Adversary Encouters - Ultimate Edition, which is generally preferred over RoTE due to being more fair. It has a Nightmare version.

 

I've heard people using Vigor with Ultimate Combat 3.0, or Combat Evolved, with the overlapping features between Vigor and UC disabled. One thing you could do is to turning off everything from Ultimate Combat besides the AI, and having the rest provided by Vigor. UC doesn't have an injury system, if you're into that kind of thing. Wildcat is no longer recommended by the author of Vigor, simply because he said Vigor does everything Wildcat does, and more.

 

Then there are a few greater mods, such as Skyrim Unleveled, which I personally use (in conjunction with Morrowloot Ultimate and Scarcity to make the world completely deleveled, but that's not exactly related to combat). There are a few similar mods to these, some of them actually delevels the world, some of them only does pseudo-deleveling, where the encounter zones are modified to have a minimum and maximum level range for spawning.

 

Then there's Mortal Enemies, High Level Enemies, and a smaller, much simpler mod called Enemy Enhancer, and a whole lot of other (older) combat mods, such as Action Combat, DUEL - Combat Realism, Deadly Combat, and so forth.

 

For animals, there's Animal Tweaks, as well as a few other mods I haven't tried. I'd be careful with this, because I just saw an entire fortress-worth of bandits (that's around 3-5 people without the Populated Series by tonycubed2) being slaughtered by 3 wolves.

 

As per dragons, there is the highly customizable Deadly Dragons, which tweaks their AI and abilities, and you can set their attribute values in the MCM, as well as their spawning time (and a few other things). You could try to find a copy of Dragon Combat Overhaul somewhere, last time I checked it was an optional plugin in "Epic Gameplay Overhaul" (which is also hidden on the Nexus). An alternative may be Enchanced Mighty Dragons.

 

Of course, no combat mod listing would be complete without ASIS and all the fun times it brings while you're figuring out how it works and what went wrong not only with the main mod but also with all of its additions and required stuff. But it seems to work very well for other people.

 

Whichever mods you pick, I'd definitely add SkyTweak to the list for final fine-tuning. It has an immensely extensive MCM menu for almost everything in the game, and it can replace several other small mods. It's also worth checking out all of Grimy's mods, although -- spare one other -- they are generally not about combat.

 

Dynamic Difficulty increases damage dealt and  taken dynamically. Meaning, it will account for a number of things in your previous fight, and will adjust (turn up or down) difficulty based on that. This is only the damage dealt - taken numbers, nothing else (it also recognizes mod-added creatures, at least it did last time I used it).

 

That's about all, from the top of my head. I have trouble creating a good combo out of all these as well. To drastically increase difficulty and the way you approach combat -- especially with followers -- you could turn magicka and health regeneration completely off (you can do that in SkyTweak, although it's still not completely clear to me whether that setting applies globally, but if it does, you can just reduce the enemy spell cost to still have enemy mages casting spells, but not infinitely). This is certainly not for everyone, and I only use it to re-create a certain game's mechanics (Gothic Series).

[27X]

requiem isn't balanced for anything, once you get ap ammo or weapons requiem becomes even easier than vanilla skyrim

 

You're better off picking combat evolved, attack commit, UC 3 and IA.