I miss the alchemy system from Morrowind though, that I could brew up potions anywhere using (voluminous, heavy!) portable equipment, but simplifying speechcraft/mercantile was a pretty nice change. I never rellly enjoyed that bit in Morrowind, it was very erratic if you'd succeed, and if you failed at bartering people started disliking you. That rather sucked. Nerfing that whole bit makes for a more enjoyable experience.
Although portable alchemy is great, but alchemy equipments are actually quite common, at least every potion vendor has one. You can also have one in your houses.
Somehow I managed to acquire a follower, an elf from the starting village. I didn't really like him when I first met him, but I guess he's of some use. He pelts stuff with arrows, although he wasn't much help against the wooly mammooth I tried to take on, or the giant...
We both got pulverized, both times!
Don't worry, you can change follower later on. There are quite a lot of NPCs which will follow you if you ask (but you can only have one follower at one time). If you want to change your follower, just tell him/her "it's time to part away" or something like that. You can tell them to follow you later if you want. They are great for carrying your things, but you have to be careful not to kill them accidentally, or, well, they'll be dead forever.
Do followers have infinite ammunition, or do I have to trade him more arrows so he can continue to shoot? Also, does he steal EXP from me, or do his kills help me level up...? Can HE level up too, or is that unneccessary? I dunno how this works...
They don't. You have to give them arrows (although archers may have hidden arrows by default), but arrows are everywhere (I never have to buy a single arrow). Also, you can recover some arrows from dead enemies sometimes. I don't think your follower steal EXP from you (nor they give you EXP), as there is no EXP at all (leveling is completely determined by your skill progress and that depends on how many times you use your skills).
Since we can't see followers attributes, it's hard to know whether they skill up or not. They probably have no perks. But you can give them nice equipments to improve their performance, although they seem to be a little stupid on selecting equipments (for example, if you give them one Steel Plate Armor with some enchantment, then give them another Steel Plate Armor without any enchantment, they may decide to use the one without enchantment). At least you can see which equipments they are using currently.
Another tidbit is, followers have their own hidden equipments by default. Unless you give them something better, they will keep using their own hidden equipments. So if you somehow see them not using armors you gave them, don't worry, they are just using their hidden equipments right now
