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 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 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 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".

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     

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

@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.

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.

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.

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.