Note:

Load this near the end of your load order, especially below large overhaul mods.

What is This?

This makes caravan harder on two fronts, increases the amount of games you can play with vendors through a robust system involving charisma, makes speech have an effect on 3 of the 4 vendors as far as how much they're willing to risk on a game, and restores the ability of several NPCs to play the game (their ability was cut for the vanilla game).

This is a compilation of the following mods:

Harder Caravan Players by ApocaLARP
Better Caravan AI by Syclonix
More and Better Caravan Fun by bitchbaron
More Caravan Players - Restoration by (who else?) Yukichigai

This compilation applies changes from each to the other (if they are all loaded normally they override each other in many areas) and it tweaks one area of More and Better Caravan Fun for an enjoyable change that manages to stay in balance.

What Does This Do to Caravan?

First, from Harder Caravan Players: Improvements are made to the decks for Dale Barton, Johnson Nash, and Lacey. Cliff Briscoe also gets his own deck instead of having to use Ringo's. The decks aren't full of tons of cards (which can gimp a deck) and they contain cards that are strong and work well together. Other mods overwrote the call to get Cliff's deck, and I believe the Better AI patch for the deck actually removed the better AI for cliff. All of that has been resolved.

Secondly, from Better Caravan AI: Apparently this mod achieves what it does by changing one variable for every deck called. I just had to go through all the other mods and make these changes to their scripts.

Thirdly, from More and Better Caravan Fun: This makes it so that the maximum of 5 games is reset every three days. It is a wonderful mod that uses a complex script to also make it so that your Charisma can increase the amount of games (more than the normal 5) you get from the 4 vendors: 6 games for 6 charisma, 7 for 7, 8 for 8, and at 9 Charisma or more you get unlimited games. It originally went off of your unmodified Charisma (getpermanentactorvalue) but I've changed it so that you can do some drugs! and get more games (getactorvalue). The author argued for keeping it unmodified, and I agree with him for his stand-alone version, but I believe that this compilation makes things hard enough that if you've just got to have more games and you're willing to do horrible drugs to get them, it's probably because you're getting stomped on most of the time by the increased AI and decks of the NPCs.

More and Better Caravan Fun also makes it so that you get better amounts of money on bets from Lacey, Cliff Briscoe, and Quartermaster Mayes according to your speech value. It says it does it for all vendors who are caravan players but I cannot find where it has applied changes to Nash, I think mainly because he already has a complicated script to call his caravan deck and things might get tricky. He's an ornery old guy you can't much sweet talk, so to me this makes sense anyway.

Finally, from More Caravan Players - Restoration: Poindexter, Melissa Lewis, and Klamath Bob were originally supposed to play caravan, and yuki's mod restores that functionality. He already had the players playing with hard AI so I really didn't have to do much, but I wanted to include it in this compilation.

That's it! If you find bugs, scream at me and I'll look into them. I may have committed some idiotic cardinal error, or some bug from one of these mods may be lingering (see below).

One final note, on "More and Beter Caravan AI" this is posted:

"On first re-load of save game where the merchant is in the same cell as the player, it seems to reset their caps. But a second load puts the caps back at normal. Not sure if this is a game bug, as the scripts do nothing to merchant inventories."

Keep an eye out for this, just in case - I haven't witnessed it yet and it may not be applicable here.