Not really. There are plenty of workshop downloaders, but only usable with 1% of workshops at best. It is safe to assume that if there is a Steam Workshop, it will be closed to outside users.

These look awesome!

I often find big 4X games like this a bit... overwhelming? Often cumbersome?

But I've been DYING for Crusader Kings 2 to show up here for ages and the idea of playing that, IN SPACE with a slight grimdark vibe will probably get a purchase from me. Never mind the inevitable Dune mod *fingers crossed*

Also really like the look of Falling Frontier - the probe launches and local system defense concepts are really neat to me. I hope I don't get bogged down in the ship building and sucking at tactics ;)


Even Terra Invicta is a neat concept. Sort of XCOM on Earth with an Expanse scale - love the idea of these distant resource structures drifting in the far reaches of the Solar System sustaining and fueling (and scheming) with the core planets across the inky dark.

Falling Frontier looks absolutely fantastic (and screams "The Expanse" to me), but I'm pretty sure I will end up being terrible at it. Like all three games from this list, it looks like it will overwhelm me and my dislike for learning new, intricate mechanics. I'd love it if it had a demo, so I could see myself just how complex and involved it really is.

Thanks, that's wonderful to hear! And yep I am a huge fan of GOG, over 100 games in my library here and love the approach GOG takes.
Thank you! We're thrilled to join the store!

We can't announce a demo yet but we certainly appreciate the value in it and will be looking into it!

Thanks! Though there's only 1 KatHawk Studios game (Alliance of the Sacred Suns)--Terra Invicta is by Pavonis (creators of the Long War mods for XCOM), Falling Frontier is by Stutter Fox Studios (a solo dev in Australia), and Old World is developed by Mohawk Games (and designed by Soren Johnson)

Splitting my replies into 2 posts as they've gotten rather long, thanks for all the comments everyone! :)

Thanks, this is wonderful to read!

We don't have any plans to restrict modding to Steam, and in fact we'll do our best to encourage the growth of the modding community everywhere.

Did you mean if modders themselves only upload to Steam workshop and not general download sites? I haven't researched that, but I will certainly look into whatever options we have to encourage mods to be open to everyone.

For what it's worth, I (Tim, CEO of Hooded Horse) am a modder myself, and I always uploaded my mod to general download sites accessible to GOG users. Here's my mod at Nexus and ModDB:

Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandbladevikingconquest/mods/5
ModDB: https://www.moddb.com/mods/vc-balance-mod

The developer made the Long War mods to XCOM games if that means anything to anyone. Still haven't tried those newer XCOM games. Terra Invicta looks interesting, maybe Alliance of the Sacred Suns also. I'm too slow for most RTS games so Falling Frontier likely isn't for me.

Thanks for the info! I suggest asking GOG for your special gold text if you haven't.

These look very nice, and I hope they'll be a great success!

Any chance of Linux versions down the road?

It does look pretty neat. I've had my share of 4X games and I'm a bit reluctant to try "yet another one" at this point, but Falling Frontier colors me interested, mainly because it appears to be more of an RTS than a 4X "it's gonna take you 72 hours and some serious head scratching to get in a position to win a game". If anything, it looks more like a Conquest: Frontier Wars (ha!) of the 2020s.

Oh, wow, that's even more impressive. Thank you for all the info!

Unfortunately, I'm pretty bad even at "normal" RTSes :( I was never very good at them to begin with, and I only seem to have gotten worse with age. When the second campaign in Polanie 2 (KnightShift if you prefer) wiped the floor with me this year I realised I should probably throw in the towel and retire from the genre altogether. I guess I need RTS games to come with a super easy "story" difficulty setting like some RPGs do these days :D

+1.
Maybe it's the difference between fantasy & magic and SF & economy? ;)
Nevertheless, AoSS seems like narrative game of political choices...

Here's the situation, as I see it (disclaimer: I have no Steam account, and I don't do mods. At most, I do patches/workarounds, which I publish from bitbucket):

If you have a built-in mod editor (or just a scenario/map editor), Steam users demand easy integration with Steam Workshop (e.g. a one-click upload to Workshop). Steam provides an API for doing so, and devs integrate this API into their games. Thus Steam users will most likely upload to Steam Workshop and nowhere else. To a lesser extent, having a one-click download and install in Steam workshop encourages modders to upload to Workshop as well. So far, there's nothing wrong with that; there may be APIs for Nexus, moddb, or some similar site, but I haven't looked into that.

Steam Workshop was created to serve Steam customers, and Valve probably doesn't like serving data to the rest of the world (although it's probably a negligible extra load, given that they are a near monopoly). They discourage allowing non-owners of the Steam game to download mods from the Workshop. The default behavior of a workshop is to disallow public downloads (actually there appear to be two separate restrictions: you must be an owner of the game, and you must be logged into Steam).

It is possible to disable both restrictions, as some games have done (see the list I linked to; in particular, the Shadowrun games started out restricted, and after customer complaints, they changed to unrestricted). Steam apparently does not document how to do this, so even developers/publishers who want to support outside users can't do this easily. I recall at least one who enabled non-owners, but failed to enable non-Steam-customers, so it worked with some web-based steam downloaders that actually used a Steam account in the background, but not on personal downloaders, like the greasemonkey-based ones.

As I see it, there are only three ways gog customers could be properly served in this situation: either no Steam integration (but that is a disservice to Steam customers), some sort of regular mirror onto Nexus or some such public site (supposedly that's what Neverwinter Nights EE does, but I haven't verified that), or figure out how to force Steam to make the workshop fully public. Some modders may mirror their own mods, but most won't, since that defeats the purpose of easy Workshop integration

Thanks for bringing these to the DRM free community (I will never purchase anything with forced DRM or from sites with encourages it). I wishlisted all of them, because I love space games. I was about to purchase another well known space strategy game, but since it has too many DLCs I was lazy. Fortunately I see this ad before purchase the other.

While I have my eyes in all of them, I have special attention on specially Terra Invicta. The idea of factions + defending the world drives me crazy, I love it. I hope it won't be a micromanagement beast. But coming from the guys of LongWar for XCOM1, which I played hundreds of hours, I think I can expect a lot of QoL. I think I won't wait to other reviews to purchase this one!

Thanks again!

Thanks, that’s a great suggestion!

Thanks! We’re not sure on Linux yet—some developers are interested in trying, but whether and when it will happen is still up in the air. But it’s something we’ll always look into.

Thanks for the kind words and excitement about Falling Frontier!

The detailed info is appreciated, and we'll certain look into options and want the modding community to be as broad as possible.


Thanks, that is great to hear!

Great games all 3! All 3 were on my wishlist already, I'm glad I'll be buying them here rather than at Steam!