Best Follower

[Daedra]

Hello;

Is Cicero good follower? Is he strong?
I am an archer, who can be best follower for me?

Thanks!

[Docsprock]

If you are a stealth/archer, the best follower is none. For just a normal type archer, any of the tank followers work well.

I play as an archer quite often, and I will take a tank and a mage with me on difficult battles.

[Uncle64]

Gear up Lydia correct and she is one of the best followers if you play as stelth/archer.
Dont give her any fireball staffs. One good bow and arrows. And one handed, she use 2 handed but not that good.

[Ondjage]

To add on what Docsprock said, I use a Two-handed/Heavy Armor so having an Archer or Mage character would aid me in DPS while I tank and pummel people which is flipped in you're a archer or a mage. You'd probably want a tank to soak up damage while your let out your damage from afar. I think the best followers are ones that patch up your builds weakness. I use Marcurio in Riften. Having a spellcaster is amazing, and Marcurio is good at it. There are always great moments to see, like that one last firebolt you didn't see coming that helped blast that draugr lord down.

Cicero is legit because you can command him to execute people from behind without any guilt or hesitation in doing so since he has the morality to commit any crime.

[amelia]

If you care about stats and usefulness more than aesthetic then you should consider watching this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04o0jg3BG8c

[Sam]

Any question about best followers is always subjective in nature.

Do you use any mods? There are quite a few mods like Amazing Follower Tweaks that allow you to change your followers' AI (and use even more than one follower at the same time). If you're interested in followers, you should check them out.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/15524/

Then there are numerous mods adding new followers, of course. Just take a look at the Nexus. Most of them are more or less skimpy female followers, but there are also a few interesting ones such as Roderick Redbeard.

Just to give you an example of how subjective the follower topic is: my favorite follower is Gunnar Stone-Eye (the old guy wearing an iron armour you briefly see talking to a kid during the Helgen episode). He just appears during the intro sequence, so it's safe to use him as a follower. He belongs to the elder race and has some nice interactions with other NPCs ("Good morning." - "What's so good about it?")

Here's how you make him a follower. He's actually dead after the dragon attack, so you have to use the console to turn him into a follower.

player.placeatme 00013643 [This creates a duplicate of him next to the player. You could probably use the moveto command as well. Adding him with the placeatme command has never created any problems for me.]
[Click at him with opened console so his ID appears.]
player.setrelationshiprank player 4
setrelationshiprank player 4
addfac 5c84d 1 [This makes him a recruitable follower. Talk to him and ask him to follow you.]

If you take a look at the Skyrim wiki, there is also a list of unused NPCs you can use in the same way. Combined with a follower mod this gives you a number of NPCs to choose from.

But be careful: don't use this on NPCs that are part of any quest or you'll break it. There are already enough factors that can break quests, so keep that in mind when playing around with the console or AFT's tweak commands.