Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War
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Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War (christ that's a mouthful) is a 4X Strategy game published by Slitherine, the same guys who published Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon and the Sanctus Reach video game, and made by Proxy Studios. Essentially, it plays like a glorified Civilization Warhammer mod, which isn't a bad thing as civilization practically nailed 4X games.
Setting
The resource rich and strategically important planet of Gladius Prime is under attack from Orks, and the Space Marine Chapter (no name ever given to the chapter), unable to defeat the greenskins by themselves, call the Imperial Guard for aid. As the guardsmen arrive, a warp storm hits the planet and screws everything for everyone. This allows Chaos to gain a foothold and drags a Tau flagship into the system for good measure. And as all this shit is going down, the Tyranid specimen held by the Adeptus Mechanicus escaped from its containment, and then, from beneath the earth, Necrons awaken from their slumber. (Oh, and the Eldar are there too.) Now the various factions are fighting for the domination of the planet and/or for their own survival.
The Factions
- Imperial Guard: Lots of cheap guardsmen and other specialist infantry with low morale, compensated by long-range artillery, durable tanks with various upgrades, and aircraft. They can also build Imperial Bastions and Void Shield Generators to help hold chokepoints and can issue a variety of edicts to boost their cities output, either to speed up unit production of certain buildings or to increase the amount of certain resources or research that is produced for 10 turns. It's difficult to get a foothold at the start, but if they can survive the early game it'll be pure hell swimming through a sea of bastions and baneblades to get to their capital.
- Space Marines: Limited to only one city, their Fortress-Monastery, but can build Fortresses of Redemption to gather resources outside the reach of the Fortress-monastery and they treat food and ore as the same resource named Requisition. They've also got a single Battle Barge in orbit, from which they scan unexplored areas and deploy orbital strikes, and they can choose a chapter tactic that gives temporary buffs either to all or certain types of units. While simple on paper you can fuck yourself by putting your Fortress City in a bad spot and losing your deployed Fortresses of Redemption means you're losing defenses and resources at once. Having some of the best infantry in the game can only take you so far since if Space Marines start going into the negative on supplies it can snowball hard without other cities to fall back to.
- Necrons: Necrons can only build their cities on top of Necron tombs and need energy to produce units and ore for upkeep and population growth. Influence can be used to repair units on the field, let infantry and heroes use Eternity Gates to teleport to cities or monoliths, and rush/speed up production of units. Tend to shred through armored units like butter and can stay in fights longer than most units. However their economy is so slow and Necron tombs aren't guaranteed to be near any valuable resources, let alone spawning anywhere safe. Hence why you need to rely on repairing your units in the field, as losing even basic units can cost a lot of time and money if you've been unlucky with where the tombs spawn.
- Orks: Ork infantry deal more melee damage when attacking and lose less morale, at the cost of taking damage when losing morale. The units have a high regeneration rate, gain ore when they kill enemy units, and increase influence by doing damage, but have an influence upkeep with the units doing more damage with high influence and having lower damage with low influence. Their cities have a higher growth rate than others, and can build fungus fields that heal units. Can steamroll both economically and in terms of manpower in the early game since Boyz will basically pay for themselves. However, this naturally means if you lose your streak by getting curbstomped or just by not fighting anything for a while you're going to have a tough time competing with what later-tier units from other factions can put out.
- Tyranids: Constantly makes new units. They consume biomass instead of ore and energy which allows them to make units. All tyranid units are disposable and can be recycled into biomass when they have outlived their usefulness. Most basic units slowly go feral when not in range of a synapse unit, and revert back to their original instincts which either weaken or kill them and eventually lose control all together. Even harder to get rolling than the Imperial Guard, but if you survive by mid-game you can start winning battles through attrition alone, and while they usually still remain squishy little things on the roster can survive Tyranids endgame units getting close. Tyranids can also make entire swathes of the map useless even after they've been killed off, so it's an almost paradoxical faction where people want to kill them off before they ruin half the map, but if you do your reward will usually just be a bunch of useless bedrock barring a few scant strategic resources.
- Chaos Space Marines: As per usual, a lot of how good they are comes down to luck. Cultists and Space Marines can turn into anything from Chaos Spawn to Daemon Princes, and performing rites will give you bonuses depending on what God you dedicate them too.
- Tau: Tau are probably the closest thing to a 'diplomatic' faction in the game, heavily relying on influence because of this. As in they can diplomatically hire neutral Kroot and Vespid units to fight for them, diplomatically insult other factions to hurt their feelings (morale) and put communist propaganda in their heads, and diplomatically just straight up buy resources instead of making them like everyone else. They can also spawn various types of drones ranging from gun drones to shield drones as essentially free temporary units to support their troops, all while continuing the time-honored Tau tradition of shooting the shit out of everyone else and hoping they die before they can get close enough to hit you in melee.
- Craftworld Aeldari/Eldar: Characterized by slippery but agile infantry that can move after shooting, slow population growth, and the ability to remote-capture neutral Webway-gates, with the caveats that they can only build cities on said gates, and that the aforementioned gates are continually being destroyed by neutrals, other players, or your own idle misclicks, their units are deadly against soft targets, but die like they're made of tinfoil and goodwill, their psyker heroes are versatile, with abilities that have inverted effects on friends or enemies, the Avatar of Khaine is their premier early beatstick available at tech-tier 4, and with correct support will level a city in maybe three turns. Their vehicles (with the exception of war walkers and wraithknights) are all fast skimmers which means you can quickly move them where you need them to be while being able to ignore all sorts of rough terrain. The fire prism is arguably the most versatile tank in the game as it can switch between three firing modes freely which means it can deal effectively with any conceivable target. Finally you can also travel/teleport between webway gates (whether they're activated or not) with ANY unit, but it costs a fair amount of influence to do so and consumes the unit's action point. With an ample amount of influence this means you are the most mobile faction in the game.
- Adeptus Mechanicus: The new kids on the block, they have global powers that scale with the number of units of a certain type. They boost Skitarii units with Doctrine Imperiatives that boost one stat while reducing another, and then there are Canticles of the Omnissiah that scale with techpriest and robot units, which debuff and damage enemies. Skitarii units are irradiated and passively damage enemies who end their turn near them. Their builder unit, the Cybernetic Datasmith, can hijack control of the neutral Kastelan Battle robots which can lead to a midgame snowball for AdMech players. Lastly they have special "optimization" mechanics with their cities, buildings in a district gain buffs for every building of the same type in that district, and are debuffed for every building that is different, Ad Mech can also get an extra slot for buildings in some of their districts.
- Neutral: The various hostiles and native creatures that attack everyone. Comprised of Kroot Hounds, ambulls, enslavers, psychneuein, rogue Cybernetica Datasmiths and kastelans, Neophyte Hybrids (Reinforcement Pack DLC), Vespid Stingwings (Tau DLC), Umbras (Eldar DLC), Lords of Skulls (Acts as a special event boss mob), and motherfucking Catachan Devils.
Artefacts
One of the features that sets Gladius apart from Civ. Artefacts are hovering, rhombus shaped relics believed to be creations of the now presumably extinct Old Ones. Artefacts are scattered around Gladius Prime, and will give a certain boon or bonus to your faction/race and/or all units under your control. Artefact buffs stack on top of each other, so controlling artefacts is very important to your survival. It takes one action for one of your units to seize control of an artefact, but units won’t be able to capture them if there are units of the currently controlling faction next to the artefact. Artefacts can apply a number of different effects depending on their type, the ones currently in the vanilla game are as follows: increase the maximum hit points of all your units, give movement buffs, give loyalty buffs, increase sight radius, increase regeneration speed, or increase damage. It is also important to note that units may not occupy the same tile as an artefact! Enslavers can usually be found defending these ancient creations, so be wary and make sure you have the firepower to wipe them out.
Recommended Workshop Mods
- Too Many Voices (TMV): A highly popular and respected mod which aims to add original voices to every single unit currently featured in the game. This also includes voice announcements for when a tech tree upgrade has been fully researched and quest line dialogue, only the Orks so far has been given the latter treatment and it is a delight to listen to. The voices are of high-quality since they're done by professional voice actors, such as George_VA who has notably done voice work for various DoW mods. This is considered by many to be a must-have mod as it enhances the immersion of the game and makes each unit feel alive.
- Gladius+: A popular mod that rescales everything (including units, terrain, and World UI) to tabletop proportions. This means tanks are bigger, infantry are smaller, and the terrain looks more realistic etc. It also adds in new HD terrain + environment textures, as well as additional team colours based on citadel paint colour schemes. All of the changes are visual-only, but the enhanced textures may put a strain on older computers, so only use this if your computer or laptop can handle it, or otherwise consider lowering your graphics.
- Red Lasguns: A simple, but beloved re-texture mod which makes all Imperial and Chaos lasers present in the game (including lasguns, multi-lasers, lascannons etc.) fire red-coloured beams instead of the regular yellow or blue. With this change it does look a lot more pleasing to the eyes.
- Locknot's Expanded Setup: A useful mod which adds many more options to be able to further customize the game setup than what is already offered by the base game. This includes new World Sizes, 12 new player colors from the official Citadel Paints list, new game paces, new difficulties, new wildlife density options, and more. It's worth checking out.
- More Artefact Types: A fun mod which adds in cut artefact types as well as adds back artefacts that existed in earlier versions. On top of that it also adds a few new ones. This encourages the player to further explore the entire map, which in the base game they had little reason too unless you set artefact density on high.