Investigating GalCiv 3 - What are your concerns with Steam?

Hmm... The founder badge doesn't show up in the OP... Will it show up in this reply?

Edit: Yes it will.

I think the most burning question for me is whether the modding support is any good on Steam.  I do play a modded game on Steam (Skyrim) but I'm not sure what sort of challenge it is going to be to write a mod for GC3 Workshop.  One of the things that might actually win people over (to the dark side, some might say) is having a huge mod library for GC3.

Anyone have any insights?

An issue for me with regards to Steam would be if the always-on requirement will be there. I do not have the good fortune of guaranteed internet coverage where I live so if I need to go online to play a single-player game it would be a major turn off for me. I have tried Steam's offline mode but after three days of being offline, Steam required me to go online again or else the game would not launch. I am totally fine with Stardock using Steam as a beta testing, game distribution and game update platform but the functionality of Steam should just stop there for me. Big plus if I don't even need to launch Steam upon clicking on GC3's executable.

Disclaimer: I am primarily a single-player skirmish/sandbox player. No multi-player functionality is not a major issue for me.

Thanks DivineWrath!

If you know when you're going to be offline, there is an offline mode that works perfectly fine. The only catch is that you must activate the offline mode when your game is up to date and you're online. 

For probably 90% of users the workshop will be a good feature. It works fairly simply, you go to the Workshop page for your game. Then 'subscribe' to whatever mods you want to play. These are automatically updated as the author updates the mod on the Workshop. You might enable mods in different ways. Skyrim/Dungeons of Dreadmor, have launchers where you enable/disable mods, then go into the game. Civ5/PrisonArchitect have in-game mod/map management tools (but god the Civ5 one is really terrible from a UI perspective...). For users it's just, subscribe, enable mod, play. For 'most' people its a great central location to find mods and makes it easier to install them for users. Instead of say going through the forums, or even going to a 3rd party website to find, download, manually extract, install mods. I tried my hand at getting into Oblivion mods and lord almighty that was REALLY confusing as hell. I mean geezus, Doom had bsp files you just threw in and played. Oblivion mod installing felt like 95% black magic. Which 'game' was I playing? But I digress.

So how much you like the Steam Workshop depends on how 'far' you want to push it. Skyrim is probably the best place to look for the weaknesses, since people love pushing the Elder Scroll mods to insane places so the 'edge cases' seem to pop up there more than other games. Generally speaking though limitations are a bit on both sides of the equation. There's a file size limit to how big the workshop can be. Some games (DoD) distribut mods as zip files so this isn't as big an issue, while skyrim doesn't have such a compression function in their esp/esm file structure so many find the file size extremely limiting. You also can't install executables, so you have to instal SKSE manually if you want to use stuff like SkyUI.

The workshop is simply an 'auto update' for a bunch of files. That part works flawlessly. But the way the mods work has to be designed in such a way as to be entirely modular. Your mod can't generally be expected to overwrite existing game data, since that will get 'fixed' by Steam as a corrupt game file.

So how 'good' it'll be really depends on how modular the modding of GalCiv3 will be. If we assume that galciv3 will be highly xml driven, then there's a good possiblity that you can pretty much do whatever you want with the workshop. But ultimately it's not really knowable at this point what Galciv3 will or will not allow via mods since we don't have any SDK or such.

In terms of concerns people will have with Steam that are fairly legitimate

* Patch control. Steam auto-updates your game. This is 'usually' a good thing since your FPS concrete grey knee high wall simulator needs all players to be on the same version. Steam was designed to solve this problem. And that's fine right up until the Civ5 devs decide that happiness is a local and not global resource so my carefully crafted empire goes into rebellion overnight. WTF!!!!111!! Or your favorite mod no longer works and the author is on vacation. NoooooOOOO!!!

Solution: Steam now allows for 'beta' access for users. Many games now have betas for upcoming patches that users can opt-into. However I say flip that on it's head. Make it such that the 'beta' is actually the 'previous' version of the game. Only one game has ever done this, Tomb Raider. But it's not 'impossible' to do it would seem. I'ts hard to say how much 'game breaking' feature changes would occur between patches that would render a save loadable but 'unplayable' but it's something that can be addressed. I think 'last stable' is a good trade off, I don't think we need a full insane revision history available as beta tracks.

* Offline Support. Note Steam does have an offline mode. "In theory" even if your internet connection dies unexpectedly, as long as you've previously authenticated it's 'supposed' to let you keep playing. In practice this kidna sorta works but is well known to be problematic. The only 'sure fire' way is to go into offline mode manually in steam. This method is very reliable and doesn't have any phone home requirements as well. Note though in Offline mode you will not have access to the workshop, or to multiplayer lobbies/matchmaking. This may mean that you can't play multiplayer at all, or maybe you can onyl do hotsteat, or mabye you can still play via IP. This really depends on what multi-player options are made in Galciv3

I want to point out too that how mod-able the game will be is determined by developer and not Steam. The Workshop's main function is just to centralize modding effort more than anything, but that doesn't mean it's strictly the only place mods for games on Steam are. Paradox games are hugely mod-able and all my copies are Steam copies.

Now-a-days the only trepidation I feel on the part of Steam is what will happen 20+ years in the future and how long games will be able to be played. Otherwise I'd much rather buy a game of Steam than go to the store, buy a physical copy, and deal with all the retail store's crap.

You can turn off auto-updates for a game in Steam.

Having played hundreds of hours of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and modding the hell out of it, I can say that Steam does not get in the way of anything. In fact, I can safely say that Steam makes everything easier, since I can install the game anywhere.

Combine this with optional updating, offline mode not impacting game performance/availability, and everthing's peachy, much better than going to get a hardcopy.

Really, I wouldn't worry about Steam at all; Valve is a good corporation to rely on.

Technically though, all that the "disable auto-updating" does is disable the Steam client from doing updates when the client is idle.

Steam ALWAYS checks the latest version of the game when you launch it and updates if necessary. So you can't really stay on the 'old' version for very long since Steam will eventually force you onto the latest version when it launches the game.

the only way to totally and utterly disable an update is to go into Offline mode

Trust me, if there was a way to actually disable updates, the gamers playing Civ5 would have done it 2 expansions ago.

You can disable auto-update on Steam.

EDIT: Out BR'd lol

...

Is that really so bad? If you don't update your game, why would you bother attempting to play multiplayer?

Again 'generally' this isn't a problem

But as I indicated, in Civ5 this was a GIGANTIC problem. Because they changed extremely core fundamental game concepts between patches. Specifically the happiness resource, which is extremely vital to the welfare of you empire, was at one point a 'global' thing. Where you did simple math of 'add up all your smiley faces' and 'subtract all the frowny faces' and that was you happiness. This meant that you mystically could keep a city in the remote outposts of you empire happy... by building a circus in your capital?? Regardless, at one point, they made happiness a  'per city' calculation. In that happiness could only be generated and unhappniness negated locally. When that patch came out, entire save games were rendered useless as you went from a well oiled war machine one turn, to -100 happiness and the entire empire in rebellion the next. That's a pretty big bummer if you're on turn 1500 of your Diety level, marathon run in Civ5. And I'm just talking about single player here, since I dont touch Civ5 multi at all (I'm not good enough to want to get curb stomped by someone online)

It's a fairly legit concern to a certain extent. Sometimes patches introduce bugs or features that maybe aren't 'optimal'. Or again maybe the mod you're using is totally broken in the new patch and then you can't play until it's updated.

I just presented a possible solution to those who might be concerned that not being able to control your game version, is something that is disconcerting about steam. And it is something that people bring up in terms of not liking Steam.

My concern is that they will ruin the combat by making it tactical.

For me, Steam is an enhancement.  I like the in-game "Shift-Tab" overlay.  I like being able to chat with friends and get updates as they sign on and launch new games.  I like my friends to be able to see what I am playing.  I like how Steam makes it easy to invite friends to join into your game and vice-versa.

I like having all of time games in one convenient library.  I like being notified when new content is available for my game.  I like Steam sales.

I like Steam.  Everyone has different opinions and I respect that.  Personally, I don't understand the trepidation some have with Steam, but that's OK too. 

Isn't this a thread about GCIII concerns?  If not, the title needs editing.

Hey, if I make a thread called "I like balloons" but the thread was about turnips, I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentioned balloons.

I found my experience with Steam very disturbing. Not the code, or function, but the support. My first Steam game was Sid Meier's Civilization V. Steam provided a bare bones support about discussion about the game without any real support. They didn't monitor the forum, didn't provide any of the "try this first" pinned and locked threads for bug resolution, didn't split the discussion into sub boards that helped split out rants, multiplayer meeting boards, bug support, etc. Everything was mixed into one humongous chaotic mess.

Donald23, SamBC, and Ragan651 did what they could to help the user community but they didn't have moderator authority at first. The Steam -> Civ V forum now at least has pinned threads that provide the basic help tips due to their effort.

I just did a quick review of Steam's forums for GC1 and GC2. Again, no "try this first" pinned thread. No splitting out general discussion, help, etc., into separated (sub) forums.I didn't look for any of the other problems I saw on the Civ V forums, so excuse my skepticism, but I have doubts that Valve learned anything.

If we see the same attitude by Valve towards GC3, then I would have to say that Steam will be a big mistake. The only hope we have for this alliance between SD and Steam to work is if SD sits down with Valve and sets some support requirements for Valve to live up to.

solution: https://forums.galciv3.com

From what I've gathered thus far, I should look into:
-Look into if Steam needs to be always on in order to play GalCiv 3 (its a big deal for me too).
-Look into if modding works well.
-Look into if updates are handled well.

And look into whether they will improve their support structure!!!