Star Wars: Empire at War - Rebel Buildings

Star Wars: Empire at War - Rebellion Buildings
This is a hint / guide for Star Wars: Empire at War. The index of all our guides for Empire at War is here.

The general strategy for the Galactic Map is similar to that for the Imperial Campaign -- blockade planets. Once you have blockaded all the Empire-controlled planets, you are essentially safe to take your time on the Galactic Map. Finish grabbing all available technologies with C3PO and R2D2 (you can get to the end of Tech Level 3) before conquering the last Empire-controlled planet.

There are not many difficult space combats unless you face a Level 5 space station (e.g., Naboo) and its garrison, in which case a Raid Fleet to take the planet first makes things easier. You get only three units (plus any number of heroes) and no Bombing Run, but if you can do it, the space station and its garrison are destroyed.

While you are conquering planets, invasions by the Empire are typically rare as long as you don't dally. Even on Hard difficulty, our game into mid-campaign saw only had one Imperial Star Destroyer and no reinforcements attack Eriadu. So, you are largely safe to build Mining Facilities everywhere you don't need Factories. Choose one large planet (8 building slots) to put up to 7 Heavy Factories and thereby speed production of those slow-to-build tanks.

You don't need many Fleet Commanders or Field Commanders, so you probably won't need more than one facility for that. Unlike the Imperials, Field Commanders can be built quite quickly. However, you cannot build any without having both Barracks and Officer Academy on the same planet. Rebel Infiltrators also build quickly, so only one building is required.

Star Wars: Empire at War - Imperial Buildings

Star Wars: Empire at War - Imperial Buildings
This is a hint / guide for Star Wars: Empire at War. The index of all our guides for Empire at War is here.

During Tech Level 2 / Mission 4 (Subjugating Geonosis), many planets will be available for conquest, although only three (Eriadu, Geonosis, and Sullust) are initially under Rebel control.
At this time you may want to capture and fully develop the planets. Alternatively, you can blitz through the Rebel-controlled planets including Geonosis (ending the mission) and continue on to Mission 5 (Attack on Mon Calamari), which also opens up Tech Level 3.

Whether you quickly take Rebel space (it is not so important to secure the planet itself, just control space for each planet) makes a big difference to how you approach buildings on planets.

You can build fleets and large stations to protect planets, but this is irrelevant to the Rebellion as they can launch Raid Fleets. They small attack forces bypass a space blockade to try to take a planet directly. If they succeed, you lose your space station.
Therefore, if you end up on the defensive, you will be overstretched trying to garrison every planet against both space and ground invasion.

Instead, if you seize Rebel space quickly at the start of each mission, you can stop them from making Raid Fleets and later do ground assaults at your leisure. You only need a few strong fleets to make multiple space sieges quickly, and one large ground force with a diverse unit mix to choose from at your first Reinforcement Point.

In such a case, you need only two types of planets: Production and Credits.
For Production, choose planets with 7 or 8 building slots, and concentrate on one type of factory. Build multiple copies of the factory, as the final production time is divided by the number of appropriate factories you have (e.g., If you have 7 Advanced Factories, an AT-AT will take only 1/7th of the usual building time).

Once you have completed a building, it's prerequisite building can be destroyed. So, if you have eight slots, you can have 7 Advanced Factories -- Your build queue is Light Factory, Heavy Factory, sell Light Factory, Advanced Factory x 7.

Every other building slot on every other planet can be devoted to Mining Facilities. Having an excessive bank account means that when a new Tech Level is available, you can (hopefully) immediately queue space stations everywhere, allowing you to build better space units.

As a precaution, the key shipyards (those that can build Capital Ships) could be more heavily defended with full garrisons in space and on land, Shield Generators, Turbolasers, Hypervelocity Guns, and Magnapulse Cannons.

Oblivion Mod Review - Dwemer Skyship

Mod Review - Dwemer Skyship
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20799 )

Overall: Simple mod, interesting to try. Very interesting "parachute" item.

Why You Would Download This: The parachute.

Although this is an old mod, it's still a very good one. It essentially works, and is very innovative.

This mod has a very basic/token quest to acquire control of a "Dwemer Skyship" -- basically a static ship that floats and has a big balloon like a zepplin. The original mod did not give the ability to actually pilot the ship, but you could have it basically teleport to you (but high up in the sky), and a separate spell lets you teleport inside.

There would be little more than the novelty of a skyship home -- and you can see a number of interior and exterior screenshots of the Dwemer Skyship at The Fantasy Art of Computer Games -- except the skyship also comes with a parachute that really works like a parachute. You equip this light item in the cuirass equipment slot, and it opens automatically when falling.
If you like long drops, like leaping off Frostcrag Spire or Dive Rock, then you have to get this parachute!

We have a little demo clip here. In the clip, the parachute twists in third person view because we also use Colourwheel's Sexy Imperial Legion, which gives a sexy/alluring static animation to all female characters when they are idle -- If you use the same mod, be prepared for this to happen. This does not happen in first person view.



Notice that while the parachute is slowing down the fall, the character can still maneuver left/right, thus moving like a slow glider instead of simply falling straight down.

A newer add-on, Dwemer Skyship v2, apparently fixes the "fire support" of the Dwemer Skyship and allows actual piloting of the ship. If you are keen on using this a lot, this is worth checking out.

Oblivion Mod Review - Verona House Bloodlines

Mod Review - Verona House Bloodlines v12.0
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14601 )

Overall: Good back-story, okay quest, essentially works fine (but see warning in our review below). Verona Bay is FPS intensive. 2008 house mod that could use some internal updates to things that COBL does much better. Some uber items.

Why You Would Download This: The story/quest. Some uber items.

First, the good stuff in this mod: There's a detailed back story, and over the course of the quest, more of it is revealed to you and you can slowly piece it together. It isn't an epic story, but it is seen through to the very end, with a tidy happy-ending wrap-up after you defeat the boss.

The mod comes with the quaint village of Verona Bay, which would be better if it weren't so FPS intensive as an exterior location. Nevertheless, the layouts, both exterior and building interiors, are nice. The Fantasy Art of Computer Games has several screenshots of Verona Bay.

The quest pits you against a vampire cult. They are small potatoes compared to the Mythic Dawn, and not very challenging overall even if you go solo and decline all the helpful companions. The early quests are quite interesting for the variety of tasks you need to accomplish, and this part is definitely worthwhile playing through.
Later on, the quests become more or less your standard go-there-kill-everything in deep dungeons and starts to drag. The final boss is disappointingly easy, and after a build-up in the back-story bits about him being very charismatic in a Dark Jedi evil-emperor way, it is also disappointing that you don't get to talk to him before he attacks you.

The bad part of the mod is in the scripting. Overall, the mod does work flawlessly, IF you follow EXACTLY what you are told to do as a next step. If not, there is no contingency scripting and you will be stuck until you "follow the numbers" exactly.

(SPOILER WARNING)

Example: At some point you will encounter Berra Gaunt. You find out she was an importer/exporter for an Imperial City company, Hackblett and Gaunt. You are not asked to investigate her Imperial City company offices, but if you take that initiative, you can find out that her partner, Hackblett, is having an affair with a woman while supposedly bethrothed to a foreign duchess.
There's nothing you can do about that right now, which is fine.

Later however, you are tasked to get some dirt on Hackblett in order to extract information from him. You already know about his affair, and maybe have stole the appropriate letters from the duchess, and have enough to at least further your investigation. However, the mod will not recognize any of this. You will actually need to go back into the office and again witness Hackblett and his mistress sleeping together before the mod will give you a quest update.

This sort of follow-exactly-along can cause you to get stuck in the mod if you are skipping ahead in what seems to be a reasonable way.

Again, I must stress that the mod does work flawlessly otherwise. It is version 12 and a lot of bugs have been stamped out. Scripting to cover contingencies can be very time-consuming, which is why Bethesda uses a lot of "requires a key" type doors and makes people un-killable ("essential") in Oblivion in order to prevent you from interacting with places and people and things before critical quests are completed. This is a simple type of contingency scripting, but one which comes across as generally artificial.

In the case of Hackblett, one way to do it might be to lock the Imperial City office and have a note saying that Hackblett is overseas. Then unlock the door and add Hackblett and his mistress later on, with the excuse that he's recently back.
But this is all additional scripting that a modder might not want to have to do and test, especially for an already large mod.

In 2008 the various sorters for alchemy and scrolls may have been innovative and interesting, but COBL came along with superior sorters that weren't reliant on having a container for specific items. For example, it will handle ingredients from any mod, instead of just official Oblivion and Shivering Isles ingredients.

Because of this, the house you get at the end of the quest is essentially just a house with place to store stuff. While it is an extensive house with a lot of storage, for the ingredient and potion sorters, you may want to pick up COBL and either Basement for COBL or Portable Sorters.

Of note is Harold the Steward, who can give you reminders about your duties to various Guilds, such as whether as Listener of the Dark Brotherhood you are due for a check-in with the statue in Bravil.

Oblivion Mod Review - Mystery of Mausoleum

Mod Review - Mystery of Mausoleum
( http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31610 )

Overall: All-new graphics makes for a fresh visual experience -- The Fantasy Art of Computer Games has a gallery of extensive screenshots of this mod. Horrible quest design wastes a lot of time. Can't use HDR.

Why You Would Download This: You want cool armor and weapons.

Mystery of Mausoleum introduces strongly Chinese-fantasy themed arms, armor, and architecture into vanilla Oblivion. All of it is contained in a few indoor and outdoor locations, and is unlikely to conflict with anything else.

If you are bent on using the HDR video option in Oblivion, you will probably not want to use this mod, or will have to experiment to see which pieces of armor you can use without getting a "black screen error" -- where the world suddenly stops rendering and all you get is a black screen plus your menu interfaces.
You can switch to the Bloom option and things will be fine (at least that was the workaround that worked for us), but Bloom can give a different look (especially for some types of walls and funiture), and you may not like it if you are used to HDR.

The English walkthrough discloses all the issues with the quests and the sidequests, and frankly, they are so ridiculous that one wonders why the mod was released with these issues -- like having to keep checking Rumours until a sidequest turns up.
Some of the so-called sidequests are not sidequests at all, but practically necessary to proceed with the main quest. For example, near the final area is a lake where being even close to the lake (while still being on shore) will inflict 100 Health points of poison damage per second. Having 100% Resist Poison will not help, either, for unclear reasons. An obscure sidequest is necessary to get the antidote for this. Or, you could cheat and use the console command TGM (Toggle God Mode).

Combined with adolescent entries for "Rumours", such as so-and-so modder being sexy and other time-wasting rubbish, the entire mod is irritating and an utter waste of time if not for the excellent suits of armor that can be obtained. Such entries, plus the sometimes over-the-top fan service (such as the melon-chested Elemental Servants in super-skimpy armor) simply reinforce the negative stereotype of Asian gamers being a lot of porn-obsessed geeks.

On the subject of the Elemental Servants, they cause Savegame Bloating more or less as soon as you load a game with this mod, even if you haven't played any part of the mod. You can remove this bloat with Wyre Bash.

If you just want the cool gear, you might as well save yourself frustration and console them in. For extensive screenshots of the gear, architecture, and monsters introduced by this mod, we recommend The Fantasy Art of Computer Games. Here are just two of the hundreds of screenshots available:





If you insist on doing the token quest in Mystery of Mausoleum, here are some uses of the console and other tips that can help you move along in it:

• Speak with Chun Xiao and Sister Feng for the side quests. As mentioned in the official walkthrough, these are randomly available through the "Rumours", which refresh once a day. To force rumors to refresh in a character, you can select them while the console is open, and then use the "resurrect" command.
• After you kill the Jade Banshee for the ingredient it drops, you can use "resurrect" on it to force it to immediately respawn so you can kill it five times for the item you need.
• For the quest to take the beggar villager around the IC, there are no quest markers indicating where you need to go, so you could possibly wander around forever and not find the five places you need to take her. You can skip this quest by using the console to advance the quest to stage 38: "setstage aaaMomMainQuest01 38", but you will miss out on the armour she gives you. Use Wrye Bash to find the FormID and console in the armour if you like. It is the ChiLian Armor.
• There are three cells in the maze in the Temple of King You where there is armor or weapons to be found in little chests, but there is no guarantee you can enter those cells. The maze, however, is laid out in a 6x6 grid, with the upper left corner being cell aaamazex1y1 (you can get there with command "coc aaamazex1y1". You enter at aaamazex4y6. The exit is the north door in aaamazex3y1.
• The Cerberus Armor in the poisonous lake obscures a large part of the screen in first person and when using a bow. If you use a bow frequently, you may wish to take this into account when choosing which armor you want to use.
• When you are fighting the final boss, try to have your back to the moat. The boss likes to move backwards and cast spells, which means he often ends up in the water if he's between you and the moat. He has high speed and a big body model, so he can get out easily, but you can't. There are two teleporters underwater, but they didn't work for us, so if you enter the water, you might be stuck.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Lost Spires

Mod Review - The Lost Spires (v1.4)
( http://www.lostspires.com/pages/downloads.htm )

Overall: All-new graphics makes for a fresh visual experience that enhances a simple but well-told story. The Fantasy Art of Computer Games has a gallery of extensive screenshots of this mod.

Why You Would Download This: You want a problem-free story and quest mod that works and gives you a good story experience for your time investment. A fresh visual experience that is not too out of place in Oblivion. Collectable and useful items that make the mod worthwhile to keep in your mod load order.

Probably the first thing that will attract your attention to The Lost Spires is the new artwork, and that will not fail to disappoint. As you progress through The Lost Spires, you will see more of it, either in architecture or items, and that keeps the experience fresh. There are all new graphics and full voiceovers, which already sets it ahead of the vast majority of mods out there.

Without giving too much away, the story in The Lost Spires is essentially a simple one, but the overall pace and structure is nicely told. From just the visual experience of some early encounters you can guess that ultimately you will uncover some ancient evil and from just general expectation you will expect a showdown -- and this is essentially how it plays out.
You may ultimately not find this not particularly interesting after you've played it, but the experience in between is what counts. There are interesting plot twists; and the various quests all come together so that there aren't any superfluous quests, and loose ends are tied up. (Although there are a couple of optional non-journal side-trips like the Malevolent Zinj and The Soothsayer which aren't tied in).
It isn't the overarching story that shines in The Lost Spires -- as said, the concept is very simple and predictable -- it's the journey that is interesting and exciting.

On the official Lost Spires site, the mod is said to have taken an estimated 1500 hours plus post-release maintenance, making it a very large project for comparatively little story.
What bugs exist are typically obscure and the official site does list various workarounds, but you will probably find that the mod will essentially work flawlessly. There are a few common contingencies that are not covered, but these are generally minor, and you may well not encounter them yourself.
The Lost Spires proves that OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender) and clever scripting aren't necessary for a great mod that delivers a story well told and a great gameplay experience.

For example, it is possible to find the tomb of Aeon IV in the Lost Labyrinth well before you are quested to do so, and if you bring the souvenir to the archaeologist who is interested in the legend of Aeon IV, there will be no response whatsover.
However, if you install the mod and play it right away, this will be a non-issue if you simply follow the (linear) story.
The most common workaround is, of course, to lock an area with "requires a key", but as exploring these areas beforehand is harmless, this is not strictly necessary.

A few typos and possible oversights (e.g., gigantic crabs still yield only one unit of crab meat -- why?) continue to exist, but they do not affect the playability of the mod.

In addition to a worthwhile story to play through, plus key encounters that are quite challenging (depending on your gear and your willingness to cheese), one of the excellent qualities of The Lost Spires is in the usefulness of the items you can get. These aren't overpowered like many mods are tempted to do, but instead aim for sheer usefulness.

For example, The Lost Spires is so far the only mod we have seen that "dares" to use Weakness to Magic in weapons. A weapon that features the magic stacking power of Weakness to Magic can trivialize many encounters, even against creatures with thousands of Health points. Because The Lost Spires can (at a mid to high level) present you with the same (e.g., In the Primeval Hollow), and at high levels you can encounter a similar situation elsewhere (e.g., if you play Martigen's Monster Mod at level 50+), a magic stacking weapon is probably your best chance of getting through these encounters in a reasonable amount of time.
We therefore feel that it is appropriate for The Lost Spires to give you such a mid- to high-level weapon for a mid- to high-level mod. The weapons are themselves not truly optimized so you can still make better ones on your own, but still useful enough that you don't have to and can enjoy wielding their unique models if you prefer.

Other treasures address some of the shortcomings in vanilla Oblivion, such as spellmaking and item enchanting away from the Arcane University. If you have a spell system overhaul like Supreme Magicka, you can have the equivalent in a spell, which makes it not as interesting. But if you don't, then The Lost Spires gives you such handy things, as well as a way to get Varla and Welkynd Stones (which, in vanilla Oblivion, are finite and non-respawning).

Still other treasures have no function in themselves, but cater to collectors and characters who like to decorate their lairs. In short, The Lost Spires has something for everyone in terms of not just loot, but loot that is worth keeping the mod in your load order even after you have finished the storyline.

Here are our own tips for The Lost Spires:

• Focus on playing the mod through from start to finish. There's very little wait time in between quests, and you can even use teleportation spells (such as SN Mark and Recall). The treasures you get are not overpowered, and useful throughout the rest of your Oblivion play experience.
• Use the third person view to help you see falling objects. In the later warlock fights and the final fight, falling blocks are scripted to magically appear and fall over you no matter where you are.
• Get Azura's Star for your magic-stacking weapon. Every Mages Guild has a spell with Soul Trap as an effect.
• Lord Pratal can be bypassed with invisibility. You do not need to kill him, and you can't loot his body anyway.
• Pick up rewards from guild members -- especially Teav (hint hint) -- as soon as they become available. You need to use the dialogue topic "Reward" with the quest giver in order to get the key.
• Feed the Zinj diamonds and pearls (other jewels are acceptable, however). You need to grab the jewel and move it into its mouth. It will drop into the Zinj and disappear with a "swallowing sound". You won't get any feedback until you give it enough jewels.
• If you plan on keeping The Lost Spires in your load order and using the Archaeology Guild as your base, you may want the third-party AI add-on to further flesh out the characters. This mod gives the various NPCs a schedule so they eat, read, sleep, etcetera.

Oblivion mod review - Return of Shadows part I v1.05 - v1.07

Mod Review - Return of Shadows Part I
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29087 )

Overall: Needs a lot of debugging. Don't waste your time.

Why You Would Download This: You like a lot of running around, killing things, and getting poisoned excessively.

Warnings: It makes a pervasive change to the levelled lists for poisons that is incredibly stupid.

First, the warning: Once you install this mod, you may start to see poisons like the following on any creature that carries poisons. So, if you are a new character just emerged from the Tutorial sewers, in your first bandit or goblin encounter you may be hit by one or more of the following poisons.

• Hemlock
• Paralyze 1 second
• Damage Fatigue 300 points for 4 seconds
• In Oblivion, having a negative Fatigue is more or less like being Paralyzed; and Fatigue is recovered at a flat rate of 10 per second, not modified by any attributes
• Drain Fatigue 20 points for 15 seconds
• Frost Damage 2 points for 300 seconds
• Hellebore
• Drain Blade 30 points for 30 seconds
• Damage Strength 3 points for 40 seconds
• Weakness to Normal Weapons 30% for 30 seconds
• Damage Endurance 10 points for 100 seconds
• Drain Blunt 30 points for 30 seconds
• Shock Damage 1 point for 400 seconds
• Deadly Nightshade
• Drain Acrobatics 100 points for 60 seconds
• Damage Health 15 points for 60 seconds
• It normally takes Master-level Alchemy and Shiverings Isles ingredients to make a three-damage-type poison that can do ~900 damage.
• Weakness to Normal Weapons 20% for 20 seconds
• Damage Luck 3 points for 60 seconds
• Burden 40 points for 20 seconds
• Daedra's Essence
• Damage Magicka 45 points for 3 seconds
• Damage Endurance 60 points for 1 second
• Especially if you use a levelling mod that calculates your maximum Health on the fly and base it on Endurance, this can instant-kill your character.
• Drain Health 40 points for 1 second
• Burn Blood
• Fire Damage 1 point for 20 seconds
• Disintegrate Weapon 100 points for 2 seconds
• This results in a bug where you have a Disintegrate Weapon effect permanently on your character, but which does nothing.
• Burning Blood for 20 seconds

Not all the poisons are of the same immediacy and lethality, but all the new poisons are grossly more powerful than what is typical in Oblivion. Whether you feel the pre-defined poisons in Oblivion are underpowered or not, it still remains that the rest of the game world and probably all other mods are counting on those poisons to be at that level. The introduction of these poisons into the levelled lists can throw off intended results everywhere else.

For example, as the poisons can show on the commonly occurring goblins and bandits, it fundamentally changes very common encounters in a very skewed way, imposing a certain style of gameplay just to survive. If you're not an Argonian or regularly carry Resist Poison and Cure Poison potions (spellcasting is probably too slow for many of these special potions), then most encounters have the potential to be life-or-death, or sudden-death (since archers controlled by the AI more or less never miss as the AI can calculate and account for arching shots or moving targets).

Further factor in the possibility that you might be using a very popular mod such as Martigen's Monster Mod, which can double or triple (or more) monster spawns. Normally not a big deal, but with these over-the-top poisons, suddenly a lot of common encounters become irritating for over-equipped characters, and stupidly impossible for more moderate ones.

The mod authors stand by their decision to put in the poison based on the logic in this mod, but stubbornly refuse to recognize the wider impact it has on the world of Oblivion. It would have been a simple matter to not insert these poisons into the levelled lists, or possibly level them properly, but because they didn't, we recommend that this mod be deleted after play -- if you choose to put up with this change and play it in the first place.

An alternative is to open up the mod with the Construction Set (you need to open the Construction Set with OBSE injected) and edit the script that inserts them into the levelled lists. We tried this and it was enough to simply delete the lines that add it to NPCs.

This mod needs a lot more debugging
There are some mods that receive a lot of positive endorsements at Tesnexus that are wholly undeserved, such as Tears of the Fiend, where the author admits to making some entirely unfathomable and ludicrous choices, such as requiring you to click quickly through dialogue without reading it.

This mod is yet another on Tesnexus which convinces me that the endorsement system is really utterly rubbish and unreliable.

From as far back as v1.05, this mod has had mod-stopping bugs, and yet continues to get good reviews. Some people chance on workarounds and manage to continue, but why certain things weren't reported and fixed until 1.05 makes the whole endorsement system highly suspicious.

For example, the very first thing that happens is Da'Cryon Mesho runs up to you, engages you in meaningless dialogue, then tries to kill you. This starts the mod. The author off-hand dismisses comments and reports by asking players to install OBSE, which is all the more arrogant and irritating because the player already has that installed.
In v1.05, which is quite late as patches and updates go especially for an event that starts a mod, Da'Cryon can show up in the Tutorial sewer and help you kill goblins before trying to kill you -- or he can simply not show up at all. He can appear when you wake up from sleeping and try to kill you without dialogue -- only he can't be killed to further activate the mod, because he is still set to Essential and therefore not-killable. Or, he can be sidetracked into attacking guards in the Imperial City, who can't kill him because he is still Essential, and you can't talk to him because as soon as he wakes up, he either charges a guard or a guard charges him. Or, he can suddenly disengage and go chat with locals.

Finally it appeared these problems were fixed in 1.06, but then the very next quest continued to be bugged.
You are tasked to kill Strongwolf. How it is "supposed" to work is that your attacks cause Strongwolf to cast a spell on you that sends you to a private arena. You start very high up and are dropped (safely) down into the arena. Cinematic and interesting, except once you got teleported, you didn't drop down. Very few people noticed this and reported it (myself included), even though it broke the mod and forced you to reload your game unless you were inclined to use the Console to move yourself down into the arena.
Yet somehow, even prior to 1.06, the mod had gotten a lot of endorsements. How? Why?
The workaround was to kill him before he could complete the spell, and that still works up to v1.07.

Silly delays like this meant we didn't progress past Strongwolf until 1.07, and very serious bugs or oversights continued.

One minor quest available is to find the "Cave of Wonders" for Ethin. Very quickly you realize it is a wild goose chase, but the quest can't be closed. I've had my character go all the way to and beyond the north-western border and return to report, but he keeps saying the same thing. I notice he isn't set to Essential, so I kill him (since I'm surrounded by psychotic idiots anyway). Still no quest update. Typically killing the quest-giver closes the quest, but not so here.
Further, everyone talks about how there should be no killing in the base lest your life is forfeit. Well, no one batted an eye when I killed him in sight of witnesses.

The next main quest after Strongwolf is to find Creal. Once you get the lead to go to Skingrad (after interminable running around trying to find everyone in the convoluted base, or trying to find a squire to help you find them), you end up in a room and can pick up a note for the next stage.
Here, the script is incredibly buggy and I had to reload about 5 times before I could get unstuck.

Once you pick up the note, your character is frozen and a winged person named Ryuk blathers what sounds like nonsense to you. Some dancing lights with about 9000 Health (yes, 9000 Health) also appear, and trigger combat with you. Ryuk runs off to cast spells at them while they wander around generally being punching bags.
Meanwhile, you are still frozen. And a Dragon Knight (a new type of guardsman introduced by this mod to all the cities) appears and starts attacking you. You can access your inventory to change gear, drink potions, etcetera, but you are otherwise frozen and cannot block, cast spells, attack, or even turn around (but you can switch between first and third person views).
If you don't have Damage Reflection and healing potions, you're dead -- and the probability of you having enough Damage Reflection and healing potions to outlast a guard attack is unlikely unless you normally carry around an excess of gear. If you do survive and the Dragon Knight kills herself, there's still a good chance you will need to reload because you are not unfrozen.

After several reloads, my character is unfrozen after the Dragon Knight kills herself from my Damage Reflection. Ryuk is still floating about trying to kill the dancing lights so I help him (with a perfectly legit weapon that has a combination of magic damage and Weakness to Magic; otherwise, this would take forever).

When they are all dead puddles on the ground, Ryuk talks to me and mentions Mirage and wanting apples.
I pull out some apples and talk to him. No, he doesn't take them.

I sneak out of Skingrad to avoid guards (I somehow got a 1000 bounty even though the Dragon Knight attacked me unprovoked), pay off my bounty with Armand Christophe, and go back to Mirage to ask her about Ryuk.
There is no dialogue about him. Instead, there is a chain of dialogue that starts with her being upset that I am talking to her without having completed my task, but concludes with her happy that I have completed my task.
Huh?
I check my journal -- No quest update.

Was something bugged somewhere during the sequence where I had to reload a half dozen times? I don't know, and I don't care anymore.
Honestly, I have given this mod way more chances than any other mod seeing as it had (as of September 21/2010) 160 endorsements, but enough is enough. A mod this buggy is utter rubbish and needs a lot more work before anyone can properly enjoy whatever story there is -- assuming the story is actually worthwhile playing through, which is hard to tell at this point.

As for Tesnexus, take all endorsement counts with a large dose of salt, since they are likely to be rubbish as well. Read the comments and ignore anything that does not have a specific reason for endorsement or criticism.

Side Note: If you are getting sudden blackscreens from seeing Mirage, try removing her Greaves via console (find the ID using RefScope and then use the removeitem command) or just editing it out in the Construction Set.