OPEN CIVIL WAR
(Skyrim Modding Project)

A recreation in cut content city battles.

It is known that when Skyrim shipped on 2011-11-11, it wasn't stripped off some unfinished elements. Among them, city battles to occur as part of the Civil War questline in every hold capital city. The questline itself has gone through several iterations during development, and Open Civil War threads the flow of it in a unique way, loosely inspired by strategy board games.

Other point of view is that Open Civil War was a research project, hacked in a janky way in the hope of uncovering causes of bugs in the Skyrim civil war quest line, cut content including.

As of today, there is a mod description, some screenshots, articles about interesting bugs  at https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/11076

On PC, download and unpack the files (OwnCivilWar.{esp,bsa}, for SSE also "OwnCivilWar - Textures.bsa") to the Skyrim Data directory.  Or, most commonly, have a mod manager do it for you.

The mod does not require a new game start. It is recommended to make a save, though:

• not near a civil war map (you might have to exit the place with the civil war map and re-enter it if you do that)

• not during any civil war quest battle (never coded for that, never tested)

• before completing civil war questline (obviously)

If the mod is installed correctly, the civil war map will have a few more flags than usually. Rogue forts like Fort Fellhammer, Harmugstahl, or Trevas Watch. It will be dormant until you choose the mode & difficulty by activating one of the civil war map flags. The cut content battles won't start until after the Battle of Whiterun.

Uninstalling OCW:

• uninstalling during civil war may well lead to the vanilla civil war questline getting stuck.

• before the civil war started, or after the civil war is completed - is not guaranteed to be safe, but the bugs you will encounter are likely unrelated to uninstalling it.
  
  

NOTE: OCW is not recommended for mod merging, or other fancy stuff - some OCW scripts have hardcoded file names and form id reference numbers.

Hosted on GDrive. 

2.8MB, no loose files, just .esp plugin and one or two .bsa archive files - download and install, plug'n'play. Versioning scheme:

• 2.6.x is the current stable branch

• 2.7.x is the current experimental branch

• Polish localization has suffix "-PL", comes in two flavors: subtitles only / fully voiced. 

• Skyrim Special Edition port has suffix "-SSE".

Presently (2021-07-05), Open Civil War is also hosted on Bethesda.net (XBox One and PC SSE) and Nexus Mods (Skyrim Classic, and Skyrim SE)

Also there, recommended mods:

• Betrayal At Hrothgar - can be used to resolve the civil war questline; not guaranteed to work if the quest line went awry already, but better than anything, especially when the trouble occurs during the final hold campaign.

• Jarl Balgruuf Dilemma (included in B.U.G.S. Lite) - convince jarl Balgruuf to join Stormcloaks (compatible with Open Civil War)