Back when Battlezone 98 Redux was released on Gog, one of the things I saw complained about most was the lack of an equivalent to Steam Workshop. The game relied on modders uploading their work elsewhere alongside Steam Workshop - which, because of how easy the Workshop is, just wasn't happening. I figured Battlezone: Combat Commander could probably do with a solution to that before it starts becoming a problem, so with a little help from Rebellion and Big Boat sorted out a guide to downloading Steam Workshop mods and adding them to a Gog installation. You can find it here.

A workshop uploader tool for Gog users will be forthcoming - SteamCMD can probably handle it but it's unlikely to be a pleasant process, so Nielk1 is looking at developing a custom uploader instead.

Wouldn't it make more sense to put the mods on nexusmods?

That relies on the modders uploading their work there, which we can't guarantee. There's certainly nothing there yet, and this is a reasonable stopgap or the meantime.

Unfortunately this procedure that you linked doesnt work with Battlezone II. from what I read at the logs, it requires a decryption key in order to download mods.

Can you provide a direct quote of the error messages you're seeing? I performed this procedure several times while writing the guide and it worked perfectly. Seeing what's on your screen would really help towards figuring out what's going wrong for you.

I am trying to download this
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1318040335

Here is the workshop log

[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Loaded workshop items in "C:\steamcmd\steamapps\workshop" (0 installed, 0 needed)
[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Starting Workshop download job
[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Detected workshop change : changed cached item 1318040335, new manifest 7330842567129615975
[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Update canceled: Failed to request decryption key for depot 624970 (Access Denied) (Missing decryption key)
[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Cleared workshop info for item 1318040335
[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Download item 1318040335 result : Failure
[2018-03-08 10:33:51] [AppID 624970] Finished Workshop download job : Missing decryption key
[2018-03-08 10:33:52] [AppID 624970] Detected workshop change : changed cached item 1318040335, new manifest 7330842567129615975

Thanks.

Unfortunately, the news is not good; as of release, you need to log in with a Steam account that owns the game in order to download its workshop mods. This is not true of Battlezone 98 Redux, so it's clearly a change made by the developers or publishers at some point (not with the intention of breaking this procedure, I wrote the guide with Rebellion's blessing). I can try to get in touch with them and ask if there's anything that can be done, but until then we're going to need to wait for a bespoke mod manager.

Sorry for the bad news, everybody. :(

Its fucking steam and Valve. this has nothing to do with the developers at this point. They intentionally did this to Rebellion for profits. They dont care about you or the customers. Only money.

I'm aware that there's a lot of dislike for Valve around these parts and I agree they do have some shitty business practices, but I don't want to jump to a conclusion about who is responsible without proof. It seems odd that Valve would apply this measure to game workshops individually; this isn't a global thing and it notably doesn't affect BZ98R, for which I wrote a functionally identical guide.

You can add me to the list of Valve haters, those guys suck, they'll never see a penny of my money, they're greedy, lazy and incompetant quite litterally the worst possible combination.

I hate the fact that they have a virtual monoply on PC gaming, thankfully we still have GOG or I wouldn't be playing any games right now.

I just had a worrying thought I assume we can still install mods without using steam workshop right ?

The GOG version of the game has a substitute workshop folder next to its /addon directory in /mydocs. The problem isn't installing them, but getting mod developers to release their content outside the Steam Workshop.

Well that's a relief, there will be at least one modder releasing their work outside of Steam .:)

It probably depends on which version of windows you are running.

I'm using Win 7 and my gogWorkshop folder is in libraries/documents/My Games/Battlezone Combat Commander