Changelog:
4.5b changes:
Changes to the Items Add-on:
- Fixed an issue that caused skeletons to occasionally have two weapons instead of one.

Changes to the Creatures Add-on:
- Zombie Races are now not-playable as they are supposed to be

Misc Changes:
- The Chance of More Enemies plug-in is now installed even if installing the SI version of the mod and selecting to not merge the files
- Living Economy is now correctly installed even if installing the SI version of the mod without the items add-on.
- The SI optional, non merged, files don't keep the SI prefix anymore after the installation is completed

4.5 changes:
Shivering Isles:
- The mod has been updated to deal with the official expansion. Every part of the mod now works in the new lands too. A lev 9-12 char at least is now recommended to adventure in the Shivering Isles.
- The forging Amber/Madness weapons system has been completely redone in the Leveled Quests plug-in for a more realistic and non leveled experience (see the Leveled Quests section for more info)
- Durable weapons now have a chance to be found in Tamriel too, this will ensure better continuity between the main land and the expansion (the feature can be turned off with the in game menu, see the mod customizability section)
NOTE: Shivering Isles is NOT required for the mod to work, you are still able to install the non SI version of the mod

Changes to the core of the mod or to optional plug-ins:
- Fixed an issue in the loot tables that caused magical armors to be rarer than how they are supposed to be in chests.
- Fixed an issue that caused key locked chests to spawn in particular quests dungeons where they weren't supposed to spawn (Dungeons Chests Locks)
- Fixed an issue of the More Wilderness Life plug-in that caused a particular quest to be  impossible to complete due to a few wrongly placed spawn points.
- Kvatch has been rebalanced, it is now a little harder at lower levs and easier at higher levs (Leveled Quests)
- Tweaked guards equipment, in previous versions of the mod (and vanilla oblivion) every city guard had both a sword and a bow and always used the bow unless the opponent got too close, now some guards will use the sword, other the bow.. providing a more varied experience.
- Guards have been rebalanced to be a little more competitive at higher levels.
- Fixed an issue that caused road patrolling guards to stay still if the patrol leader was killed (Leveled Guards)
- Fixed an issue that caused the fenced money requests to do the Thives Guild quests to not bet the supposed ones (Leveled Quests)
- The arena champion has received some balance tweaks to make him a little more harder to defeat (Leveled Arena)

Changes to the Items Add-on:
- Armored Circlets have been added (50+ variants). Female NPCs will have a chance to equip one of them, they will also be foundable in chests and buyable at the Red Diamond Jewellery store.
- Added rusted variants of iron and steel weapons, undeads and skeletons will often use them instead of the normal ones
- Illuminate Staves are now buyable at Rindir's Staves
- Fixed a couple of magical weapons that were mising their enchantment.
- Changed the non trasparent background of a couple of shields to the default transparent one.

Changes to the Creatures Add-on:
- Added several variants of race-based zombies. Dead imperials, elves, orcs etc. of both sexes can now be encountered in undead themed dungeons.
- Added a bunch of new creatures and new creatures variants
- Added a few new reagents
- Guars are passive more ofren now

Misc Changes:
- The installer should now able to properly register the BSA files on Windows Vista

Special thanks to Newraven, Adonnay and Swell for their help with translations.

INSTALLATION / UNINSTALLATION  NOTES
- Keep in mind that after completing the installation you still need to load the installed files in the data files section of oblivionlauncher.exe
- The mod requires the official 1.2 patch (and/or SI) to be installed
- To uninstall the mod, please use the uninstaller located into your oblivion\data\Francesco's mod dir. If you remove the files manually without using the uninstaller, please remember, if you did install the items/creatures add-on, to also remove the FraNewItems.BSA and FranNewCrea.BSA entries from your Oblivion.INI file
- The Shivering Isles version of the mod will obviously not work without the official expansion installed

Tired that nearly all creatures level up with you? Bored that at level 25 every bandit of the world are god-like ones with daedric equipment?
Then this mod is for you. I think that the game has to be challenging but that not every fight has to be an epic one. This mod aims to create a more realistic and enjoyable experience, it will not make the game easier, just more credible (it actually can make it harder depending on the parts you decide to install)
This mod changes nearly all the creatures lists to make them more static. Even if you will still find very strong stuff at high levels you will often (for example) find normal skeletons and zombies in dungeons, wolves and imps in the wilderness and so on.. not every bandit will level up with you but some of them will be static.. I also changed most leveled items lists, in vanilla oblivion at say level 20 you used to find only high level armors and weapons and low-mid stuff nearly disappeared from the game, now it will be much harder to find high lev equipment, and low-mid lev one will still be common later in the game.
One of the strenghts of this mod is it's modular nature.. every part of the mod is optional and you are able to customize it to your taste during the installation.
The optional parts cover many things like guards (all guards used to keep leveling up with you, so no matter how strong you were they were always a bit stronger than you. Using this part of the mod, while some guards still level up with you, many of them will stop at about levels 15-25. Stronger guards will usually defend more important places/people), vendors (you used to find chainmail/dwarven mithril/orcish armors and weapons in creatures/npcs loot before seeing their appearance in shops, this made armor/weapons vendors nearly useless after reaching level 6-7, now you will find those stuff in shops many levels before but at increased prices), new unique enemies/bosses (a small chance to find stronger unique bosses with names and personalized combat styles/loot), more enemies (more creatures/npcs in dungeons, aviable in three variants) houses/dungeons chests (improved, more interesting, diverse and often more rewarding but still balanced loot), quests (tweaked main and guilds quests to make late quests harder for unexperienced characters, forcing to level up so you can't become master of the fighters guild at lev 8), arena (later ranks will be much harder for weak chars so you can't win it with a low lev character) and much much more (read the full readme for a complete list with detailed info).
There's also an items add-on which adds a ton of new top quality user made weapons and armors to my loot lists and a creatures add-on adding many quality user made creatures.
The mod also provides very detailed in game customizability features.. via an easy to use in game menu you are able to change lots of settings in a couple of clicks. Check the right section in this readme for more info on in game customziability.
Plese read the full description below for detalied info on all the parts of the mod.

Francesco's Leveled Creatures-Items mod - Main file -
This is the required file for my mod to work, it's the core of the mod, where every change to the scaling system of npcs and items was done. Can't list every change here, check the readme after the installation. The main esm file also contains many leveled lists used by the optional parts.
You can choose between a few variants of the main file.. you can decide to have Lyrondor's combat Behavior mod and/or MOBS mod merged into it, and you can choose between 3 different types of loot. You can also decide to install the mod with integrated Living Economy mod. Below you can find a small description of the optional components you can decide to install togeter with the main file.
You can install the mod with 3 different loot systems, where the hardcore and extra-hardcore loots make valuable items rarer and a lot rarer compared to the normal one. You can find a detailed comparison between the various loot systems in the loot spreadsheet contained in the same dir of this readme.
Since the 4.0 release the loot system is fully in game customizable via an easy to use in game menu, see the mod's customizability section.

-- Francesco's leveled creatures-items mod with Lyrondor's combat Behavior --
Lyrondor Combat Behavior mod, changes Ai combat/fighting behaviors... the goal is to provide more diverse fights... sometimes more challenging.    The version included into this mod was tweaked to give creatures/generic npcs about a 20% chance to spawn with Combat Behavior tweaks disabled.. this will ensure even more diverse fights! More info about the combat Behavior mod can be found in the readme. This optional component also adds a feeling script, generic npcs like bandits will have a small chance to flee during combat, the chance is based on both the remainng heath of the npc and a comparison between the npc's level and the player's one.. so npcs weaker than the player will have higher chances to flee.

The new parameters are governed by percentages, mostly, and new multipliers, so it doesn't mean that the very first Skeleton Champion or Troll you'll encounter will automatically and immediately be more aggresive for the whole fight. The key word here is "potential". It's a simple matter of how lucky you were to encounter one or multiple enemies that actually uses the new potential of higher aggressivity and/or efficiency.

-- Francesco's leveled creatures-items mod with MOBS --
Medieval Oblivion Equipment Balance System, MOBS rebalances every weapon of the game giving them a more realistic and credible feeling. Range and speed will be lowered (way too high in the vanilla game) while the damage will be overall raised. Every material will now feel more diverse.. glass and elven weapons for example will be faster and lighter (with lesser durability too) while others material like ebony and daedric will have uber damages but won't be that fast, it will still be worth using higher lev materials.. but this increased diversity between materials will add a bit of realism. Arrows will do more damage and will be faster.. but thanks to the reduced backwards running speed close range archery won't be effective like in the vanilla game.. This could also increase the challenge for some type of chars. You can find a spreadsheet containing detailed stats of every weapon of the game in your Francesco's mod dir. Below you can find a description of all the changes that will be done by this part of the mod:

CHANGES TO MELEE FIGHTS:
- Reach, reach has been shortened a fair bit. The reaches in default were too long and it looked weird. You will need to get closer now, but it will look better, as if your weapon is actually hitting the target and as if they can hit you. 
- Speed, speed has been reduced to give the weapons more diversity and to give them a more realistic 'feel'. Glass and elven weapons will be faster than those made of other materials (but it will still be worth using higher lev materials like ebony thanks to their uber damage).
- Damage, damage increases in the usual way with new materials. However scaling is now fixed to a percentage basis, rather than the unbalanced default system whereby weapons with lower damaged increased disproportionately. For example in the default daggers damage increases around 200% from iron to daedric but the longsword increases by only about 100%. This meant the daggers became the most powerful weapon late game. Now all weapons increase percentage wise as follows to maintain the balance. Damage in general has been increased.
- Weight, weight is a more important property than in the default because it has much more of an effect on fatigue burn. Steel has been made to be of the same weight of iron, glass and elven weapons are now lighter than the others materials but they have lesser durability too. Weapons in general are noticiably lighter (expecially higher level ones).
- Fatigue, three game settings concerning fatigue have been altered. The base cost of swinging a weapon or fists is reduced from 7 to 5. Hand to hand will be less fatiguing. The effect that weight of a weapon has on your fatigue as you swing it is increased dramatically. The result is that all weapons will fatigue you more, especially heavier weapons. 
- Power Attacks, the amount of fatigue you lose from performing a power attack has been reduced from 5x a normal swing to 3.5x to stop them from being overly fatiguing. The speed of power attacks has been increased, so as to prevent them form being too slow with the new slower weapon speeds, and to increase their speed from default. So power attacks will be more viable than in the default, for more interesting combat.
- Melee sneak attack bonuses scale up more smoothly as you become better at sneaking:

CHANGES TO ARCHERY:
- Damage, the new ineffectiveness of archery at close ranges (see reduced running backwards speed below) allows for arrow damage to be increased alot. Arrows do 1.5x more damage than default. NPC archers will be more dangerous because of this.
- Arrow Speed and Physics, arrows' speed through the air has been increased 1.8x to better reflect the speed of a real arrow. This will make it easier to hit moving targets and harder to avoid being hit. The way arrows behave, such as bounce off things and arc through the air has been tweaked for more realism
- Arrow Recovery, fired arrows will last longer before disappearing. From 90 to 600. Maximum fired arrows that can exist before they begin to replace each other has been increased from 15 to 50. The chance of recovering a fired arrow from the body of a dead opponent is increased from 50% to 75%.
- Marksman Sneak Attacks, marksman sneak attack bonuses scale up more smoothly as you become better at sneaking:

CHANGES THAT CAN AFFECT BOTH ARCHERS AND MAGES:
- Reduced Running backwards speed, the speed you can run backwards is decreased so you can't sprint backwards as fast as you can forwards. Backpedaling archer/mage was too imbalancing and boring, now you will need a bit more tactic in this type of fights.

CHANGES TO HAND TO HAND COMBAT:
- Reach, Hand to hand reach has been reduced slighty so it is equal to the dagger.
- Damage, Hand to hand damage is up slightly,.The amount of fatigue damage that hand to hand does has been increased by a factor of 3x. This means that hand to hand will weaken opponents, meaning that they will do less damage and be in danger of collapsing. Hand to hand has been strengthened in many ways because other weapons are more fatiguing and slower. This is where the advantage of hand to hand lies.

-- Francesco's leveled creatures-items with Living Economy --
Living Economy tweaks many things related to the economy of the game's world, the goal is to make it more credible and dynamic. If you install this togeter with the new items add-on LE will take care also of every new item giving it regional/dynamic prices. Below you can find a small description of what LE does (this is just a small summary, you can find the full readme inside Francesco's mod dir)  Note: the LE version bundled in this mod has been rebalanced a little to make player's life a bit harder, items selling price has been lowered a bit and vendors will usually have more gold.

Francesco's new items add-on
Adds new third party armors and weapons. There will be a chance to find them in every type of loot, chests, npcs/creatures loot etc. The chance is not big.. you will still get vanilla items most of the times. High lev items are rarer compared to lower lev ones. Lower lev items will also have a chance to spawn in vendors. There are also 2 magical variants of every new item.. the current add-on features about 1.400 new normal+magic items.
These weapons and armors were rebalanced to fit well in the mod.. most of the them were simply too powerfull.powerful. Screenshots of all the included stuff can be found in installer. Keep in mind that you have to download and install the add-on containing all the textures and meshes of the items for this part of the mod to work!  The items add-on also adds new  illuminate staves (aviable in 13 different variants)  to loot of Necros, Conjurers and other mages.
New in 4.5: Added 50 armored circlets (and a dozen of magical variants). Female NPCs will have a small chance to equip one of them, there will also be a small chance to find them in chests. A few of them are buyable at the Red Diamond Jewellery store in the IC. NOTE: The circlets cannot be equipped by beast races (credits to Kafei)
New in 4.5: Added new sets of rusted iron and  steel weapons/armors, undeads and skeletons will often use them instead of the normal ones (credits to Koldron, Windsurfer, Martigen and Daemoncleaner for the resources)

A list of included  items can be found below. Iin case a weapon set is tagged as buyable it means that the lower lev variants are buyable in shops. Even if an item can be found in vendors the chance of this happening is random.. so you have to be a little lucky and/or visit a few shops before finding what you are looking for... keep also in mind that the apparence of these items in vendors is related to your level as any other item of the game.

ARMORs

Francesco's new creatures add-on
Adds new, quality, user made creatures, you will have a chance to fight them mixed with the old ones.. chances to find a new creature are however smaller compared to vanilla ones.. about 1/5. The add-on currently features about 120 new creatures of many types/level ranges and dozens of new retextured variants of existing creatures/aniamls.. this will give unmatched variety in all circumstances. This part of the mod is aviable in a few variants.. you can install it with/without a size rescaling script and with/without additional Ai/Behavior scripts... more info below.
The new creatures add-on is also fully in game customizable, via a simple in game menu you will be able to adjust most of its scripts to your liking, for more info on in game mod customizability see the right section below in this readme.

-- Francesco's new creatures add-on with size rescaling script --
This script will dinamically, randomly resize creatures/generic npcs heights (within realistic ranges) applying also stats changes realed to the new height, bigger creatures will get a small boost in health/stats.. the increse is directly related to how much the creature get rescaled.. if it will be 10% bigger it will receive a 10% health bonus and a 10% bonus in all stats.. while if it's 5% smaller.. it will get a 5% malus to health/stats. The heights variation is not completely random.. to give a realistic experience creatures will most of the times have an average size while ones with noticiably bigger/smaller sizes are rarer. This script will affect both the new creatures and the vanilla ones/generic npcs. This script is mainly aimed to increase variation in encounters, thanks to it, for example, when you will encounter a group of bandtis.. these will realistically vary in height and won't be all the same.

-- Francesco's new creatures add-on with new Ai/Behaviors scripts --
These scripts will give animals a more credible attitude towards you.. they will flee/attack you depending on a few factors like their agression level and their confidence, non agressive animals will also turn towards you as you approach. These scripts will also give a chance to skeletons/zombies to rise back from death after a few minutes you have killed them increasing variety and unpredictability in undead themed dungeons. The amount of health it will have after raising from death is based on how much time it remained dead.. if it will rise after only a few seconds.. it will be very low on heath
It also adds many new ingredients including Axebane 2.5 ingredients/pelts + a few new ones added by me to the some of the new animals (so, for example, the hell hound has a piece of hell hound meat.. which is a powerful reagent with resist fire/fire shield/fire damage effects).
This component will also tweak the factions system.. adding more factions and tweaking factions relationships to make them more credible and realistic, animals like wolves/lions/bears/boars and creatures like ogres/trolls/minotaurs will have their unique factions and may randomly attack each other depending on their aggression, so, for example, you many now see, sometimes, ogres fighting trolls or wolves fighting boars, smaller creatures/animals have smaller chances to attack bigger ones.
This optional component now adds also a new AI package to aniamls giving them the ability to look for water to drink.

-- Francesco's new creatures add-on with new new creatures higher spawn frequency --  
This optional component will make the new creatures more common, you will encounter them more often. Install it if you think the new creatures are overly rare with the default setting.

A now the full list of the new creatures with their stats and credits:

* Added in 4.5

Apart from adding all those creatures, the creatures add-on now also adds new retextured variants of many existing creatures/aniamls: new lions, leopards, wolves, hungers, slaughterfishes, mudcrabs, liches, clanfears, daedroths, goblins and more! Credits to Koldorn, Cryonaut, Sabbath and Gored Guar.

Francesco's optional files 1
It's recommended to start a new game for these 3 parts of the mod to work at 100%, if you don't want to start a new game don't worry simply do not use this part of the mod and start using it after your next restart. Note: Tests reported that a restart from the sewers exit is not enough to have the leveled quests optional part of the mod working at 100% with every npc leveled to the right level, you need to restart from the very beginning of the tutorial... sorry but this is how this game works.

Francesco's optional Leveled Quests
Tweaked main quests and guild quests, these quests will be much more static.. their difficulty will not be based on player level... if a quest is meant to be hard ... it will have strong enemies even if the player is low level, in this way you won't be able to become master of a guild at level 10. Loot you will find in these quests (and in the chests of their dungeons) will be based on their level and not on player level, so if at level 3 you try to finish a level 8 quest you will fight against level 8 enemies instead of level 3, and their loot will be the same as if you fought them at level 8.

Example:

What do min level and max level mean? Consider it in this way: if you do a quest between its min and max level it will be in terms of difficulty the same as in the original game, if you do it before the min level it will be harder or impossible dependig on the difference, if you do it after the max level it will start to be easier. If at level 5 you try to do the fighters guild number 11 quest ( 16-26 ) you will find level 16 enemies even if you are level 5 and their loot along with the one of the dungeon will be the same as if you were level 16. If you do the same quest at level 30, enemies will be capped at level 26, so it will be a bit easier. Similiar numbers are used for other other guilds quests and main quests.

This part of the mod will also make a few non quest dungeons significantly harder than others.. in these dungeons there will also be higher chances to find good loot.

Amber/Madness Items forging overhaul   -   Shivering Isles Only
You can now forge high lev items with a low lev char and low lev items with an high lev char. Adds 3 different Amber/Madness qualities (impure, normal, pure)... high lev equipment requires more/better resources to be forged. As in vanilla Si.. amber/madness can be obtained by either killing Gnarl/Grummite creatures (but now the low lev variants will usually carry impure resources.. while higher lev ones will often carry pure resources) or looking for ore deposits/colums (in this case.. the impure/normal/pure chance is partially scaled for balance reasons.. but you still have at least a very small chance to find pure ore even at lev 1). Amber Materials List and Madness Ore Materials List books have been tweaked to show in-game the new resource requirements, which can also be seen in the tables below:
 

Francesco's optional Leveled Arena
Level capped arena combatants, they will have minimum and maximum levels based on their rank, their equipment will also be based on their level alone and not on player's level like in the vanilla game, in this way you will not be able to finish the arena at level 5 and if you start it with a very high level charachter the first fights will be easier as one would expect. Higher ranked combatants now have also a chance to use magic weapons. The arena champion is not level capped so it will always be a challange.

Gold rewards are also increased for all ranks except the first one:

Francesco's optional Leveled Guards
In the original game every guard leveled with you, so they were always a challenge even at very high level. With this part of the mod guards are level capped ranging from level 15 to 30, stronger guards usually (but not always) defend more important places. Night guards are sometimes a little weaker. You have to restart to have this part of the mod working at 100%.. read above in the leveled quests optional part section for info about this issue. Guards will aslo have torches in their inventories and will use them at night.
This part of the mod now also adds more patrols along roads... you will find single guards patrolling roads or even small groups made up of 2-3 guards.

Francesco's optional Dungeons Chests Loot
Boss chests at the end of a dungeon have more gold and better loot, normal chests around a dungeon have a bit less gold compared to the original game, this to make things a little more realistic, a bandit band should keep its gold and treasures in only one place instead of scatter them around a cave, boss chests will have gold and loot of the whole band while normal chests will have those of single bandits. You can expect to find about 50% less gold in normal chests but the total loot of the dungeon will be a bit higher becasue boss chests will have much more gold and also more chances to have gems, jewelry, potions scrolls etc. in this way after finishing a dungeon and killing the boss you can expect something worth the time. This applies to most types of dungeons but not to undead themed dungeons. This also will raise a little bit the chance to find armors and weapons in dungeons chests, making thieving and dungeon crawling in general more interesting, the difference is not big and not noticiable in a single chest but in a whole dungeon will let you find a couple of more pieces of armors/weapons. You can find an example of how this works in the readme.
This part of the mod now also adds misc items like food, ingredients and clothes to dungeons chests improving loot variety by a lot.

Francesco's optional Houses Chests Loot
Tweaks middle and upper classes house chests to make thieving more interesting, diverse, and rewarding. In vanilla Oblivion houses chests were very poor and in no way rewarding for the thieves... this parts of the mod adds more weapons/armors to houses armories (increasing also their quality) with a chance to have also magic weapons and armors. The gap between middle and upper tresury chests is also now higher.. but not always an upper class chest will have better loot than a middle one.. it will happen most of the times though. Tresury chests will defenitely be more rewarding.. and also more diverse. Silver clutter value has also been raised a little bit. Detailed comparisons betwen how house armory and tresury chests work in my mod and how they used to work in vanilla Oblivion can be found below:

But it's not only the number of items to be increased.. it's also the quality of these.. while in Vanilla Oblivion you can hardly find anything better than steel.. this part of the mod gives you the chance to find even very valuable items.. upper class chests will often be even more rewarding than a dungeon boss chest.

Francesco's optional Dungeons Chests Locks
This optional plug-in randomizes chests locks making them lesser based on player level, chests with harder locks will usually also have better loot. Dungeon chests that used to be always locked will also have a small chance to be unlocked.. while chests that used to be always unlocked will have a chance to be locked with a random lock.
It also adds a small chance to put traps on locked chestst.. the strenght of the trap is tied to the difficulty of the lock, when the player tries to open a trapped chest a check is made on his security skill.. if the check fails the trap is fired.. if the check doesn't fail a message is displayed informing the player that the chest could be trapped.. if he then tries to open it again.. a second security check is done.. in case even this second check is succesful the trap is disarmed.
The plug-in adds also a very small chance for every dungeon chest (NPCs themed dungeons only) to be locked and trapped with a "guardian" near the chest holding the key to open it, the difficulty of the guardian is random.. the higher his strenght.. the bigger the loot inside the chest.

Francesco's optional Chance of More Enemies
Aimed to those who like a more hard and/or action oriented game.. it will increase the number of enemies found in dungeons. This part of the mod is aviable in 3 variants: normal/hardcore/extra-hardcore. I would recommend the normal version to any of you who wants a little more challenge and more diverse dungeons while keeping the original game feeling untouched, the hardcore version mostly to those who like more action and/or much more intensive dungeons, I recommend the extra-hardcore variant to those who seek a very hard and arcade game (high end system is recommended for this variant). A comparison table showing how the 3 different variants work can be found below: