Dear devs,

I've read that playing the game with mods enabled will disable achievements. I implore you to reconsider this:

• You've been trying to popularise a mod scene, that's why you added Steam Workshop support but disabling achievements makes people, like me, avoid using mods.
• Not all mods are boosts/cheats: for example the expanded colours mods are purely graphical. Custom maps also harm no one.
• Even if a mod is equivalent to a cheat then what's the real harm done? This is a 4X game, almost everyone plays it in singleplayer, there are no online ranks/unlocks and if anyone really wanted to cheat to unlock achievements then there are at least two much easier ways to cheat than by making an overpowered mod and then playing the game.

For all these reasons, I beg you to remove the check that disables achievements if mods are enabled. It helps no one (doesn't protect the achievements from cheats) and harms people that would like to play the game with some mods and unlock achievements along the way.

It would be real nice if you do this for the other Endless games as well.

Agree with icarus. Achievments should be earned on the same basis for all players. 

This is the only way to ensure fairness among the community IMO.

On the other hand, extra achievments could be created for Mods users even though I doubt the Devs would invest time on it.

icarus86 wrote:

There's IMO no way that you can make sure that cheaters won't use mods in order to get achievements more easily.

So with regards to achievements, everybody should be on the same level - which is either vanilla, or a fixed set of mods which are "approved" by the devs & community.

AFAIK, other publishers see this the same way, e.g. Paradox. Mods are very popular (and useful) with their games, yet you need to play vanilla to get achievements.

There are simpler ways to unlock achievements than by playing with mods that make things easier. If anyone wanted to cheat, he'd just use an unlocker and 100% all the achievements with a single click, not bother to play the game with mods that may or may not make getting an achievement easier. Currently, even purely graphic mods like more faction colours or UI changes also disable achievements.

Moreover, it's very self-defeating to try and get a mod community going (an obvious goal of Amplitude, why else would they add Steam Workshop support?) but then penalise everyone using mods. Result: people aren't using mods and other people don't bother making mods, knowing that they won't be used.

Let's take the example of the Civilization series: you can play with mods AND earn achievements. This has not led to people abusing the system. Example: the achievement for beating the game on hardest difficulty has been earned by 1,9% of players of Civ5. What does this tell us? People don't use mods to abuse the system, they play with mods to have fun. How is anyone harmed by people using mods in singleplayer? "The community" is not an argument for singleplayer: no one looks at your stats, you aren't getting any advantage over anyone else in a competitive mode. Hell, you aren't even unlocking anything usable even for singleplayer. If the Endless Legend/Space had a persistent progression system, then I'd agree that mods would ruin the experience. But Legend/Space aren't Dungeon of the Endless, there is no progression and no unlocks by beating a game. Even multiplayer doesn't earn you a rank.

And it must be said that there are some design decisions by Amplitude that are objectively wrong, by any standard. One needs to only mention the Sisters of Mercy unit and hero to prove the point...

The easiest thing in the world would be to use the Steam achievement unlocker to 100% everything. But it turns out people, me included, like challenges and like being rewarded for beating a challenge. Cheaters exist but they are few and they can't harm a singleplayer "community" , plus by making mods disable achievements you won't stop cheaters. Paradox may have the same policy but the way Civilization 5 handles it shows it's a wrong policy that needlessly punishes people who do not want to cheat.

How about making sure the achievements unlock in the first place? (Full Deck, It came from the depths,...)

Have you submitted a bug report? That's the only way this will get fixed.

Don't rely on other people doing it, the crowd effect means nothing will get done because everyone expects someone else to do it.

I feel mods should allow achievements, cheaters can easily use cheat software for achievements without mods and some people want to improve the game while being rewarded for their ingame skill. i feel it puts out the modding community

Regardless of the question of difficulty, I think everyone can agree that mods that are solely aesthetic should not disable mods, after all, they don't affect gameplay at all.