Ok devs, it's seriously time for full workshop support. Seriously.

They need a way to reconcile mods for that.  ILO & IAB  (or any other mod that touches a core hull/improvement/tech/etc) for example basically needs to replace the entire file  rather than just overwriting the specific item(s) changed.  Even though the changes are largely to different things, they are wholly incompatible as a result. 

I really don't care very much what the challenge is on their end to make it happen. They promised it, it's incumbent them to make it happen. This isn't a ridiculous request and I won't be made to feel like it is.

I don't think its a ridiculous request and i do not think Tetrasodium did either.  Most would likely agree its a totally reasonable and desired request.  Big problem is the longer they wait the harder it will be not to break user ships and mods. 

I agree. We were told there would be steam workshop support for modding... then when the release of steam workshop got close, the verbiage used in updates and dev-streams became suddenly much more narrow in focus. Then, we got a very narrowly focused release of steam workshop.

I have one of the most used mods (as far as I can tell via Nexus Download counts), and I very purposely have avoided content that would conflict with other mods... expecting that there would be steam workshop (for real) and I would have to contend with oodles of mods and such. Right now, there are 30 on Nexus. Sad Sauce.

What's worse? That basically if I posted my ship designs on workshop, I'd end up competing with myself and my mod, which uses said ships. It is frustrating, pretty sure I'd have several more thousand downloads at this point if I was on Steam Workshop and not Nexus.

Now that being said, i'm very happy to wait, and I'll keep plugging along, but I would really appreciate a word from SD on either A) a rough estimate, and a commitment that this is going to happen, or B telling us it won't be happening. 

As for the difficulty? Meh? Rome Total War manages this, its just as complicated a game, and frankly, I think that dev-team is nowhere near as proficient as SD. This is most likely a matter of resource time, not competencies.

I agree.

WE NEED MODS.

Full, real mods. And we need them NOW. This is a major selling point for Gal Civ 3. You want sales? Let us do full, real mods, easily.

- Custom ship colors

- Custom tech trees with an easy tech tree editor

- Ability to assign created ships to new shipsets, and download and manage shipsets

- Ability to assign custom fighters to carriers

etc. etc. .

Cities Skylines DOES sell like hell because it is so modfriendly. Learn from them and earn a ton of money, more than with any Snathi DLC.

I think it is really time for full mods to appear, and it should be top priority for the Devs. I understand that some guys like Frogboy or Paul may be working on AI sort of stuff, but there should be other coders dealing with full mod integration.

I've posted a gameplay example of what the game can look like here:

https://forums.galciv3.com/471347/page/1/#3587928

and it could be even so much better and more customizable when we really have full mods. There was some technical post some time back that some things need to be changed so a mod will only alter some important lines in a file, and not replace the whole file. In this way multiple mods can coexist and be loaded into the same file without conflict.

Helm, set a course for full mod support. Engage!

I agree that full workshop support would be great, and would probably push our download totals up by a few hundred. 

But let's get a little perspective. Mods aren't a major selling point for any game. They really aren't. Only around 10% of any game's playerbase EVER use a mod of any kind - which includes the faction and ship mods already on the workshop now. The big TC mods, even the wildly successful ones like Game of Thrones for CK2 or the Total Realism mods for TW, never really break that that 10% figure; I can remember about 2 months where the stats showed AGoT being more than 10% of launches and those were considered truly extraordinary by both the modders and Paradox. Even mods which fix genuinely broken games (like my own PDM did for the base game of Vicky 2) don't; V2 sold a couple of hundred thousand copies and I very rarely got over 10k downloads for a release, for a mod which had almost no serious competition. Gauntlet's mod is the most popular for GC3 currently, and has just about 1000 unique downloads. That's roughly as many as the total number of simultaneous players of GC3 at any given point, and gives you an idea of how statistically irrelevant mods really are. 

Given those figures, I'd guess improved workshop support beyond what we already have will not have a massive impact. Most of the players who want mods will already be looking here, on the Nexus, or on ModDB anyway. Maybe 5% of the playerbase will benefit from slightly easier downloading and installing of mods, but for the vast majority it won't have any effect at all. Remember how Brad keeps mentioning things like 90% of players never go over a medium map; 50% never use anything other than the default race etc. These players aren't looking at mod support as a big thing, and think downloading a faction pack is modding the game. They have all the mod support they need already. They'll benefit from a focus on improving the base game - better balance, better AI, better UI.

Ultimately, SD are quite right to be prioritizing sorting out the base game before worrying about total integration for the workshop.  

I believe Frogboy made much the same point on numerous occasions about how the AI wasn't really that relevant to sales/play since the vast majority of players never went beyond normal, or for that matter, beginner.

Thankfully, feedback, and your own tireless efforts prevailed, and we will be getting much improved AI. The people here, while a bit over the top at times like JTS80 (or maybe myself), have much the same passion you do for AI and I don't think the statistical argument will work.

Now I generally agree, modding support won't sell a lot of new games right now. I do think it will keep us playing the game for a lot longer, and looking back at each DLC. In our genre, perhaps this is irrelevant, but clearly, in other genres, its becoming a bigger and bigger deal. Skyrim of course, being perhaps the biggest "breakthrough" of modding and mods becoming more available to the average user.

Fallout 4 is boasting mod support on the X-box platform (IIRC), that might be a first. Steam, thought mods could make them some major cash (a misstep in how they handled that, and I'm still waiting for that donate button lol).

These are corporations with vast resources committing large sums to these aspects of gaming. They are not doing it for "the heck of it".

But those players still benefit from the AI improvements. They might not see it as a priority, but they do appreciate the improvements even so. In the case of mods, we're in 3D-printing-ships territory - an incredibly small portion of the playerbase see any benefit from it at all, and everyone else is completely unaffected, asking 'why the hell was someone working on THAT while ship battles don't work properly?!?'. 

Mod support certainly extends a game's lifespan, which is why it's nice to have it. And as a total conversion modder, I need extended workshop support even more than you do. But let's be realistic about where we stand here; we're basically asking for something a bit selfish. We're asking for SD to build us a marketplace for our mods above focusing their resources on things that will help out the whole player base.  In the Docs folder, we have an effective means of using mods, and we have this forum, the nexus and other means of distributing them. They work. There is enough stuff that actually isn't working as designed that SD should probably be occupying themselves with right now. 

I suspect that full workshop support will be showing up about the same time as the mod tools do, several months down the line; this would be the ideal time to do so as the mod tools could be used to pack mods in a certain way, easing the problem of incompatible etc. It'd be nice to hear some level of confirmation on this from SD, but I don't really think this is one where we can win an argument on priorities.

Letting my ADD show, i'll hop around with short comment

I know it true cause FB said it (+meta) BUT man this is hard to believe. I mean i can see how newbies start this way (i did) but as you learn and get addicted you just have to level up.

Don't dispute your data but i also find this hard to believe, i mean i do BUT.... You guys do absolute great work (SD should put you under contract).  If the "advertising" (ala workshop) was better i don't know why the vast majority wouldn't be grabbing all this great content.   Sad Sauce, you bet.  Ya'll do so much fine work for the lov of the game , plz keep it up

Hummm.. Could one of them START WITH AN M     

On this, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I do think those metrics will look very different later in the game's lifecycle, and I also wonder just how many of the 90%/50%ers are the ones who buy DLC. I suspect a lot of them are <20 hours guys, who play the game through on normal twice then dump the game onto the shelf and forget about it. But I've not seen any metrics which attempt to measure this.

With V2, while my player base remained fairly steady at 10k downloads a month over time, the base game's playerbase fell over the course of a year or two. So while maybe 5% of them were playing with mods at the beginning, by 2012/13 maybe 50% of the active player base were using them. 

It's been mentioned somewhere that the 3dprinting thing was coded in beta & just hadn't finished QA till now... but it's entirely reasonable to say that they were the simple result of a partnership  with one of the 3d printing sites or just a matter of hooking into an opensource premade library.

As to the ai improvements we have been seeing in 1.3 & foreshadowed in 1.4, you can't ignore the fact that you & I pretty much pushed the ai scripts to their limits, You also can't ignore the multiple hundred+ turn soak save games submitted with highlight commentary & "see here" saves of many many bonehead ai actions/general activity on packed insane maps to help with it alongside any other previously provided savegames to help ease in targeting the problems

I agree that iit will happen when it happens.  They added the TechInflation stuff in 1.3 & paul mentioned that it's getting shifted to be map size dependant & covering lots more stuff in one of the recent dev chats... That's kind of something we asked for & I suspect might have just been a matter of moving a hardcoded variable into the xml's.  Rather than pudhing for "full workshop support" of any kind of mod right now, I'm more interested in pushing for things that allow better mod interoperability like this (which we kinda got), or this, this, and/or this.  The reasons are simple...  those sorts of things will allow modders to run more freely until & after we do eventually get the workshop stuff

I'd just like to add, that I bought this game because of mods, naselus' mod specifically. I like big maps, and loved the idea of GC3's Insane maps, but read the early reviews about the AI, and decided to just keep an eye on things. Once naselus put his mod out and showed progress I took the plunge.

In any event I guess I'm not a typical customer as far as the dev team is concerned, as my priorities for picking up this game were:

1: Good AI

2: Biggest possible maps

3: Modability

I saw all the ships and factions in the work shop and just assumed that the AI would use the custom ship sets affiliated with the custom races in the workshop. I was boggled at the idea that this was not the case!

I would love to see proper mod support be released, and I really hope the AI fixes also work for big maps.

@Gauntlet - I would acutally be using your ship sets right now, but they would not work with naselus mod because I believe your mod is more of a conversion mod, rather than individual ships for download. You should really release your ships on steam, they look great. Some are kind of covered, some are not (ie there is a small defiant, but I believe yours is medium?).

@Syntax_VI

GRM is the opposite of a conversion mod. It dedicates itself to being as compatible as possible with all mods, and changes zero game-play functions. All it does:

1) New logos, portraits, backgrounds.

2) Adds custom ship styles the AI will use.

3) Adds custom color schemes for ships, using default game files (doesn't change your game install).

4) Adds minor race. (I would drop this and #3, if I could do #2 in workshop)

All of its changes, are thus, aesthetic, and in fact, don't change anything, just add. The only mods that could conflict, would be ones that SUBTRACT ship blueprints, modifications to ship blueprints that already exist, would be compatible.

"there is a small defiant, but I believe yours is medium?)." You might be thinking of someone else. Defiant is a star trek ship, I don't do star trek, all originals, and some Babylon 5. 

As for steam. My ships are really good, but they are not the best of the best or anything, though, I might have the best animations... SHRUGS...

...any single ship would easily get lost in the shuffle. The quality of my work stands out when taken as a whole, and I'm really only interested in supporting my content as a whole, GRM is a customer experience, and currently, offering GRM on Workshop would not meet my standards for that experience, hence, I will not offer it on workshop... I'm treating GRM as a brand product, its a hobby, but I'm taking it seriously. This is also why I'm thus far (I'm open to rethinking this one), refusing NOT to use animations to their maximum potential. I'm trying to sell you a Cadillac, don't buy it if you have a shitty garage (your PC).

You can easily download the mod just to grab the ship designs and throw out the ones you don't want if you like. 

Hope that helps clarify! Have a good one!

PS: Confirmed, Naselus mod seems totally compatible.

@Naselus

"Mod support certainly extends a game's lifespan, which is why it's nice to have it. And as a total conversion modder, I need extended workshop support even more than you do. But let's be realistic about where we stand here; we're basically asking for something a bit selfish. We're asking for SD to build us a marketplace for our mods above focusing their resources on things that will help out the whole player base. "

I think this is where the original poster's point comes in. This would be a valid argument, if I had never been told we would get full steam workshop features, but I WAS told that, I paid money based on that. Now, I really don't mind waiting, and I'm not being selfish, I'm being persistent about what I believe I paid for. What I personally want at this point is transparency. The OP wants things "NOW". I don't have that need, just a little information about when- if ever, and vague non-committal information at that.

ILO too, I've had GRM installed since well before I even started on that

Well it'd be a separate mod file of course.

I have one, that I think largely fixes my personal peeves for Starbases.

It...

1) adds a speed boost module to econ bases, less efficient than the military one. 

2) Sensor improvement that increases sensors by .75 of the base, available to any base.

3) +2 range improvement available to any base, no techs. (helps with mining spam).

4) Military bases have...

---Hull improvement with regen that costs durantium, about 3 levels

---Improvement line that increases planet's defense/resistance, and eventually, adds interceptors to them too

---STRATEGIC Repair increase modules, that cost Thulium

NOTE: most of these cost 2 or even 3 construction points. Figured that would help balance it a little, since I doubt the AI will use these modules much or properly.

Also been playing a little with ship modules, a well balanced, experimental ion drive that costs Promethean, a size 1, filler part, that adds a little HP, and a tourist module that generates cash per-turn.

I was also playing with custom hulls, but the game does not like that, and it wasn't going to be feasible. At least not, by appending. You could mod the original hulls just fine. I was interested in making tiny/small have a natural evade bonus. I had a custom hull, that if you took a certain specialization choice, became available, it was a tiny hull, but had a natural bonus to sensors and movement, making it a ideal scout. It was an interesting idea, but again, the game hated it and had some serious bugs. 

What would I mod if I had the time? I would really love to completely re-do the ideology trees into something far less "Good and Evil and some neutral like thing", the ideologies of Civ Beyond Earth, were a bit better nuanced. But I need to learn a lot more before I could try that.

Ahh, I thought that you meant avoiding stuff in GRM for compatability.  The move increase military starbases can get has a target tile effect movecost iirc, pretty much useless as soon as you cross the starbaserange for that starbase & too powerful if you make it big enough to matter.  I've done some testing recently with jumpgates that work ala galciv2's movement enhancing starbase stuff & still working out some kinks with balamce & such.

Sadly, there is not really a good way to inject stuff into the tech trees, rafactiondefs/etc.  You might be able to do an include statement like ShipComponentDefs.xsd  & some of the other schema files have, but you'd be replacing the base techtrees with new ones that include the include line & instantly hit compatibility issues there I tried adding moves to hulls before I started playing with jumpgates, but it kinda wrecked the early exploration by making it almost trivial.  interestingly enough, pirates became much more dangerous because they could actually kinda chase you after you research interstellar travel/ion drives if you don't load up for speed.

there isn't much we can really do with making the ai make use of starbases that do new things since it only knows how to use & react to military/econ/mining/culture starbases

From what I recall trying in beta, custom hulls you have to edit the schema  to make them work.. .but they show up under other hulls or do awful things I tried making a tech & hull that made an advanced cargo hull or something iirc & was able to make it, but it showed up right alongside the cargo hulls unfortunately instead of in a new ship category, likewise with new module types at the time at least (adding a new tab might not even be possible so understandable there)..

The fact that we can't insert new stuff into all tech trees/factiondefs really limits what we can do without modding the base files & running into duplicate complaints by the syntax checker if we try to do things for interoperability

As to getting the ai to use things properly, giving brad save games showing the ai doing stupid stuff is orobably your best bet if it turns out to be a small thing to teach it in the compiled C code.

The ColonizeEventDefs/Text.xml files are actually very simple, stuff gets pulled ffrom it randomly.  if you added a bunch of new ones like the ModdingReadme.txt suggests for appending & have them get pulled randomly from any vanilla/modded version.  the only trouble would be if you wanted to modify the core ones too.  You could increase the new entries chances of being pulled over the core ones just by dupliating yours a few times with unique internalnames for each duplicate

Interestingly enough... as hard(limited) as it is to add new starbase types, I suspect that it's bleeping trivial to set a new model for those new types in FactionShipStyleSetDefs.xml... but then you run into the no way of adding stuff to all/any races on the local install & only the races you set will actually have  anything set if they aren't using a default style

There are two different discussions here:

Mod support and Steam workshop support.

Steam workshop

Many mods can easily break the game for other people if they forget to include something.  Hence, some sort of Steam workshop support for just all mods is not going to happen. Ever. 

There are many other paths that might be possible depending on what Steam supports. For instance, we'd love to see well established, well tested mods be able to be available through Steam workshop. But does Steamworkshop support that sort of thing? Will have to find out.  We don't want to have to QA dozens of Star Trek mods that break the game if the player doesn't have a particular DLC or some other mod already installed.

Friendlier Mods

Now, before someone compares the brand-new GalCiv III engine to an engine/library that's been out for a decade, I do want to make clear that we intended to continue to invest effort into making more radical mods easier to do.  You can already see this in Sorcerer King (a 5 year old engine) where people could basically do total conversion RPG mods for it (you could basically write Baldur's Gate for that if you wanted to).

Here are the areas high on our list:

1. Technology Trees
2. Planetary Improvements
3. Campaigns

There are others on the radar but these 3 are the ones we're actively writing code to support in the game and then on Steam workshop.

Thanks for jumping in!  I think the first point pretty much got smacked with "yea it would be nice, but there are reasons it would be awful today" that you mention as some of the modders jumped in.  Once so many of them were all in the same thread talking about those reasons, things kinda threadjhacked towards the second point .  I don't think any of the modders in the thread are too concerned about the current pace and steps  just because there have already been some & you guys are so involved.  

I don't know the first thing about making campaigns yet & haven't tried, but when you say "Technology trees" & "Planetary improvements" does that mean that we might get a way to inject things like a new branch into any local tech trees provided the new branch sprouts off something that exists in it?  

Frogboy, thank you for comment. That is great to hear.

But  I wonder, what about matching ships to custom downloadable races? As far as immersion goes, this is pretty huge. Even if you could go in game and match each ship size style with a ship in your folder that would be a huge help. Downloading a custom themed race, and then downloading all the beautiful ships that can go with it is fantastic. But it just wrecks it when you realize that the AI really wont use those hulls for the most part.

Also, I think I read that custom races all use the same music (terran) and that each of the races actually have different music. I've never heard them, as I went straight for mods and the custom factions. It would be great if you could select faction music, and have a greater degree of control over color as well.

The last two could easily be handled in game, and I think the first one (setting preferred hulls for factions) might also better be handled in game. Matching shypstyles with factions is huge for me, and I'd gladly pay a DLC fee = to the price of the game just for that feature

Right now it is technically possible to match factions with ships, but the process seems pretty convoluted and difficult from what I can gather.

It does confuse me, that 2 (improvements/tech tree) of the last 3 parts to establish fully custom races isn't on that list (ship style creation/management) and that the missing component is something that utilizes a piece of the game that already has such investment (ships/ship designs, ship sharing).

...For campaigns? Something that will branch into numerous new avenues... like introducing custom sounds, voice overs, unique assets, triggers, etc. Can O worms I think.

But hey. I asked for transparency, I got it! Thank you very much for the reply.