You can get a Headless Zombie or Skeleton Guardian at Journeyman level if you want something that does melee. Not so great if you also melee though, as stated above...

dude, some of the bandits are smart. i've snuck up on a couple camps and dropped arrows on them, and one camp completely dispersed; each bandit running his or her own way. i waited a couple of minutes, and one would show up. i'd drop that one, and another would trickle back in.

i personally hate the ai of friendlies. i couldn't keep people alive closing an oblivion gate because my counterparts kept running ahead of me and would get swamped. if i missed a swing on an enemy, it hit them, then they'd get pissed at me and start attacking me as well. so in the heat of combat, not only do i have to try and kill the enemies attacking me, but i've got to get the friendlies to yield. not fun.

Why are you guys so bad at fighting with allies? Are you fighting in first person view? I use third person so I can tell where everyone is. I almost never hit my allies, and never enough to have them turn on me. That's why I'm not worried about using a summoned melee deadra.

I walked into Oblivion and my NPCs decided to jump in the lava. Great job Bethesda.

Minor spoilers, AI/Oblivion story:

I went in the first gate at Kvatch, fought some small daedra off with the help of that NPC who's still alive in there. Then he asks me if he can go back to his friends... I refuse, saying I need his help. He lets out a big sigh, says alright, then runs right into the lava.

I almost felt bad about it.

Because I find the actual plane of oblivion so INCREDIBLY BORING, I was looking for the best mean to run through those levels as quick as possible.

Well there's nothing quicker than just running really frickin' fast. Just drink a healing-over-time potion or continuously cast healing spells and you'll do just fine. The basic layout of the sigilstone tower is almost almost completely the same. The only difference lies in the fact that you sometimes have to open the big gate or expand bridges. But usually it's straight forward. This way you don't get xp (except for the armour your wearing) and little loot (I do open up all those cocoons), but it gets the job done.

Running around a particular portal I did have some fun slaughtering a horde of deadras, deadroth, wind atronarchs and those spider thingies. Because I couldn't find the entrance to some caves that would lead me to the tower, I kept running around a lot and after a while about 16 monsters were in pursuit. Knowing that I would defenitely die if they gained on me I suddenly came with a marvelous idea when I saw a small pool of lava. I ran around its border so that the pool was just in between me and my persuers. The AI figured that the fastest way to get to me was right through the lava. It is needless to say that none of them even got near me and all the bodies were left floating for me to loot empty. All sixteen of them had 1 by 1 jumped into the lava.

You know, thats when you need to take a screenshot and post it here. :p

The problem is that I think the AI sees lava as just regular water and tries to swim through it which, obviously, doesn't work. I'm sure it'd be easy to fix in either a patch (if/when bethesda releases one), or possibly even modded in. But no matter the cause, it is pretty funny to see all of your enemies burn to death because they tried to take a shortcut :p

Yeah I forgot

Always remember, Printscreen is always a finger away, like so many things. *wink wink* o_O

Whoever was asking about health potions: Almost all of the alchemists in towns sell them.

Just an interesting thing that happened earlier- not sure if anyone's run into this. I ventured to the harbour with one of my characters- a youngish female. This pirate comes strutting up to me singing a song about beautiful ladies. When he finishes, he just stands there, smiling triumphantly. I spoke with him, and he just give me this 'What of it, woman?' sort of response. Haha, classic. It's little details like that which make the world come alive.