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Achievements have been updated on Gladius and include Tau achievements!

Finally, I'll be interested in playing this game

How is the game shaping up - being as its published by Slytertherine I'm always a bit cautious as they tend to have a lot of very small teams/developers who tend to end up making games that have good ideas but clear gaps in them (eg in the Armageddon game there's no proper "skirmish" AI as such so battles are really limited in what army you can play as on them

 Overread wrote:
How is the game shaping up - being as its published by Slytertherine I'm always a bit cautious as they tend to have a lot of very small teams/developers who tend to end up making games that have good ideas but clear gaps in them (eg in the Armageddon game there's no proper "skirmish" AI as such so battles are really limited in what army you can play as on them

Game is fantastic. On release I gave it a pass, and I condemned it after a dlc just added 4 units and nothing more, but after they added Chaos I gave it another try and it was fantastic. It's amazing how just adding two factions (Tyranids and Chaos) really made the game so much more fun. Gladius was the game that got me super into WH40K.

Gameplay wise every faction is unique. So if you're a fan of a lot of factions this game is a serious time sink. It's not just resource management that's different, its also endgame strategies that are different.

Tyranids for example, they only have 1 resource "biomass" instead of ore, energy, and food. All of their units have to be next to a Synapse creature or suffer penalties which forces you to get a high level Hive Tyrant later because they're the only Synapse creature whose Synapse radius is bigger than one tile. Their endgame unit Tyrannofex is spammable, has the longest range of all endgame units, and is utterly devastating against everything other than infantry. And they're ok against infantry once you fully upgrade them. So once you hit a critical mass of Tyrannofexes supported by sufficient amounts of Carnifexes with Hive Tyrants nearby you steamroll because in large army battles, you need multiples attacking the same target to kill it and that's really hard to do if your attack range is 1. Tyrannofexes' attack range is 3. Tyranid cities are small but spammable. I still play tall with them and I end up with 4 mega cities at the end. First hero you build is a Tervigon who spews out termigaunts for free and you either use them as fodder troops or consume them for biomass, up to you.

Chaos's healers are hero units so you can't get that many, but their vehicles (daemon engines) are ridiculously tanky and are self-healing. ALso, all chaos Infantry has a chance of getting:
1. A permanent stat boost
2. Ascend to a Daemon Prince
3. Turn into a Chaos Spawn
upon killing anything. That's right you can have a Daemon Prince on your first turn if RNGesus is kind to you. If it's not, then your high level hero can turn into a chaos spawn. Ouch.
Chaos can get the 2nd city out the fastest (turn 9 as opposed to turn 30). You produce and sacrifice cultists regularly to gain production bonus. Your infantry can be marked with a mark of chaos which grants them bonuses depending on which god's mark you gave them. Their endgame unit is the Defiler which kicks absolute major ass especially for its cost, but if he can't melee then his damage isn't really that great. Against mass air units they aren't that great but against any and all land units, both infantry and vehicle, Defilers kick ass. But since if they can't melee they're not threatening, once the super endgame arrives with large armies of ultimate units, Defilers are gonna lose because you can't get enough defilers piling on top of the opponent's tanky units to kill it in one turn. Endgame I have 2 mega cities.

Necrons have restrictions where they can settle (above necron tombs only) but in exchange their upgrades really boost their tall power to the point I beat the hardest difficulty with only one city. All units have necrodermis and they regen like crazy every turn. Their healing factor is double that of the Chaos's daemon engines and all of their units have it including their most basic infantry. Their endgame unit, Obelisk, is an absolute beast. Effective against all units, and tanky as ****. It takes a hell of a lot of pepper to bring one down even with a mega mass of Tyrannofexes and they can pretty much 1-3 shot everything in the game while never dying because Canoptek Spyders heal them really quickly and there's no limit to how many you can have. Tesseract Vaults are a fusion of obelisk and transcendent C'Tan, but it's generally a bad idea to make them because of action economy. Tesseract Vaults can't attack and cast abilities on the same turn while an Obelisk and a Transcendent C'Tan can. Oh and Monoliths act like teleport gates. You can teleport necron units to and from Monoliths.

Can't comment on other races as I didn't play them, but they're unique. None of them are similar to another.

My one and only complaint is that the game is small-scale. Defilers, Obelisks, and Tyrannofexes are your ultimate units. Not Titans. Anyways I vouch for this game.

Oh and my experiences are all pure single player at the highest or 2nd highest difficulty. I stay away from PvP due to extreme toxicity. Not that this game's community is toxic, i wouldn't know as I never tried, but generally pvp communities are toxic so....

Interesting. I had given this game a miss when it was released as it seemed like a poor Civ clone, but good to hear a lot has changed since then.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Interesting. I had given this game a miss when it was released as it seemed like a poor Civ clone, but good to hear a lot has changed since then.

It's nowhere near a civ clone. Game is 100% combat, no diplomacy, no trade, and resources/city building is super simple and straight forward. In fact I don't really like it. After building like 4 buildings you need to spend a LOT of time building shelters to increase max pop cap (you need 5 empty pop space for maximum pop growth speed) and then spend a LOT of time building buildings that deal with the upkeep that results from the pop increase, and then finally you can start building military buildings again.

I mix in some beyond earth with my gladius play and the two are nothing alike.

yeah my biggest issue with Gladius, honestly is it's main "Feature" to stand out from Civ is they removed elements of the game.

Sorry but what's Gladius

This is Gladius.

Looks like Civilization to me based on those screen grabs. I can dig that, as I love Civilization. I'm guessing there's more to it than that, though.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Looks like Civilization to me based on those screen grabs. I can dig that, as I love Civilization. I'm guessing there's more to it than that, though.

Nope, less than that.
As others have said its Civ 5/6 without the diplomacy, culture, espionage, etc. but with a 40k skin.

BrianDavion wrote:
yeah my biggest issue with Gladius, honestly is it's main "Feature" to stand out from Civ is they removed elements of the game.

There's literally no diplomacy in the setting, so why would it be in a game? XD

Voss wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Looks like Civilization to me based on those screen grabs. I can dig that, as I love Civilization. I'm guessing there's more to it than that, though.

Nope, less than that.
As others have said its Civ 5/6 without the diplomacy, culture, espionage, etc. but with a 40k skin.

Why don't you play the game before denouncing it? What you're saying is identical to calling starcraft a civ5/6 game that's just real time without diplomacy, culture, espionage and with a 40k ripoff skin.

Game is a fantastic wargame. Its combat experience is unparalleled compared ot civ 5/6. Saying the game lacks a culture victory method or lacks a way to make an alliance with orks, bugs, and chaos as a reason it's bad is ludicrous.

I didn't denounce it. I didn't give 'a reason it's bad.' I described it.

It _is_ a Civ-alike without several of the standard 4X systems, leaving only combat and exploration. Whether that's good or bad is an exercise left for the reader.

Voss wrote:
I didn't denounce it. I didn't give 'a reason it's bad.' I described it.

It _is_ a Civ-alike without several of the standard 4X systems, leaving only combat and exploration. Whether that's good or bad is an exercise left for the reader.

My deepest apologies. I am terrible at reading the tone of posts.

roboemperor wrote:

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Interesting. I had given this game a miss when it was released as it seemed like a poor Civ clone, but good to hear a lot has changed since then.

It's nowhere near a civ clone. Game is 100% combat, no diplomacy, no trade, and resources/city building is super simple and straight forward. In fact I don't really like it. After building like 4 buildings you need to spend a LOT of time building shelters to increase max pop cap (you need 5 empty pop space for maximum pop growth speed) and then spend a LOT of time building buildings that deal with the upkeep that results from the pop increase, and then finally you can start building military buildings again.

I mix in some beyond earth with my gladius play and the two are nothing alike.

Which is exactly why I called it a poor Civ clone - it's essentially a civ game with a 40k skin but all the depth stripped out of it, i.e. diplomacy (which admittedly doesn't really work in a 40k setting) and no trade or complex resource system.

At least that's how it appeared to me on the surface and how it was portrayed in the early days of previews. It might be worth another look since there has been some development with factions etc since release but I still doubt there's any real longevity to it.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Which is exactly why I called it a poor Civ clone - it's essentially a civ game with a 40k skin but all the depth stripped out of it, i.e. diplomacy (which admittedly doesn't really work in a 40k setting) and no trade or complex resource system.

At least that's how it appeared to me on the surface and how it was portrayed in the early days of previews. It might be worth another look since there has been some development with factions etc since release but I still doubt there's any real longevity to it.

Unless you want to call starcraft a game with no real depth because it has no diplomacy trade culture etc. your view is incorrect. A pure wargame can have a ton of depth. DoW imo didn't have depth because it did a lot of things wrong but gladius has a ton of depth. At this time imo DoW i, ii, and iii are incomparably inferior to gladius. Starcraft is still the superior game.

It also has a very complex resource system.
Food = Pay for infantry, pay for pop/infantry upkeep
Ore = Pay for vehicles/buildings, pay for vehicles/building upkeep
Energy = Pay for vehicles/buildings/infantry, pay for vehicles/building/infantry upkeep.
Influence = Pay for Hero upkeep, pay for global race abilities
Research = duh.
Loyalty = Pay for pop upkeep
Max pop limit = Max pop growth when you have 5 empty pop space, drastically reduces growth if you have less.

As mentioned before, pop upkeep is a true ***** to maintain. Not an exaggeration when I say half your buildings are gonna be dedicated to maintaining pop upkeep because you need like 4 different types of buildings to address pop upkeep. And the rest of the half has to be extremely well chosen as you are very strapped for everything due to opportunity cost. Focusing on military a little more might drastically delay your late game tech acquisition but sometimes it's necessary. Building just one more research building than normal can severely impact the size of your army, focusing too much on keeping your pop growth maxed (as pop limit is your bottleneck all game) will also completely hinder your military and research, and influence is very powerful but you're gonna have to sacrifice everything if you want more of it, etc. etc. Also should you go tall or wide?

As for strategies. Focusing purely on one thing (infantry or vehicles) will let you pump them out faster and lets you skip a lot of tech but you lose out on versatility, but sometimes you can get away with it, sometimes you can't. Trying to go both infantry and vehicle needs you to plan ahead because since you're only gonna be building 1 production building for each type, it'll take like 8-10 turns to pop out one unit so you gotta think ahead. And then there's army composition, and when you're gonna go for the win, etc.

As I said before, if you think wargames have no depth then you are mistaken. I wouldn't say it has as much depth as starcraft, but it definitely is as deep as civ, except 100% of that depthness is combat and not spread across random stuff.

Your opinion fair enough - but you can't tell me that my opinion on the game is incorrect.

The 4X market is saturated with better choices IMO

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Your opinion fair enough - but you can't tell me that my opinion on the game is incorrect.

The 4X market is saturated with better choices IMO

Whether you like the game or not is your opinion, but calling any combat focused game with no diplomacy as shallow is incorrect. Again, you wouldn't call starcraft shallow would you? Turned based starcraft = gladius.

I'd call starcraft shallow.
Every time you bring it up to defend gladius, I think less of gladius by association.


But I also don't think the lack of diplomacy is the full thrust of NurglesR0T's complaints about the game. There are different expectations for a 4X than there are for a three-faction RTS beat-em-up like starcraft, and gladius simply refuses to engage with a lot of them. That can be described as shallow for the genre.

Seems kinda dishonest to say that it's a Civ game with features removed. It's a Civ game with different features, and ones that are more appropriate to the setting

Diplomacy doesn't fit the setting.

The tagline isn't "In The Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium, there's quite a bit of espionage going on!".

It's war. Only war. Of course it has no diplomacy. You're meant to be killing everything.

Anyway, yeah, Tau. I'll never pass up an opportunity to slaughter blueberries.

I find it amusing how people are talking about how diplomacy shouldn't be a thing whilst also announcing that Tau are coming as they are the most likely race to use diplomacy


Also Diplomacy does happen all the time. It's just its very restricted and limited. Tyranids, for example, shouldn't get any diplomatic options. If they did then it would only be through espionage and terrorist style actions of genestealer cults. So it would be limited mostly to the Imperium.

Which is the other issue, what diplomatic options you'd get would vary race to race a lot. It's like the old Allies system in that some armies end up with loads and some nothing. This can be balanced out, but it can be very hard. When an Imperial player might be able to ally and secure boarders with diplomacy on several fronts a Tyranid player could well end up at war on multiple fronts - esp if the diplomacy allowed ganging up.



I can see diplomacy falling to one side. The lore just doesn't hold up to it working well and fitting the theme of the various races.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Seems kinda dishonest to say that it's a Civ game with features removed. It's a Civ game with different features, and ones that are more appropriate to the setting

No, because they didn't bring in any new or different features. That would be dishonest, since they removed genre staples and didn't replace them with anything.

Voss wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Seems kinda dishonest to say that it's a Civ game with features removed. It's a Civ game with different features, and ones that are more appropriate to the setting

No, because they didn't bring in any new or different features. That would be dishonest, since they removed genre staples and didn't replace them with anything.

Gladius is a turn based RTS game. The only "genre staple" they removed is the real-time.

I've thought about getting this if it goes on sale, but I heard it has issues with Nvidia cards. Can anyone confirm if this is true?

 Wuble wrote:
I've thought about getting this if it goes on sale, but I heard it has issues with Nvidia cards. Can anyone confirm if this is true?

Something about vulkan. i don't know. I had an issue, but i updated my nvidia drivers, and the game now runs perfectly fine.

 Wuble wrote:
I've thought about getting this if it goes on sale, but I heard it has issues with Nvidia cards. Can anyone confirm if this is true?

Not sure about most people but I know every so often my screen ends up with wavy lines.



Not sure if that's stuck on friends-only but that will give you an idea of when the screen does go bad. This is back when I started playing and I've gotten much better.

I'd like to show the current battle I've got going on. I'm imperial guard and my ally is orks. I'm playing with the same friend but he had his 2nd big city destroyed and it had all 3 of his infantry barracks. Anyway it's progressed beyond turn 140 and the original team of 3 A.I. that destroyed his 2nd city are dead. The other team of necrons, orks and nids are sending most of their forces to fight me and I have 2 baneblades, 2 basilisks, 2 commissars, 2 tank commanders (just built the 2nd), lots of leman russ tanks and I think about 4 techpriests for healing vehicles every so often. My biggest city has 3 vehicle factories, 2 hero production facilities and 3 techpriest building facilities. My 2nd biggest city (interestingly enough my 3rd city which built so quickly due to 2 population growth points) has 2 aircraft production areas. I kind of skipped infantry for the most part because imperial guard infantry aren't super great in gladius (except maybe heavy weapons).

My ally isn't being prioritized as much and he does have dakkajets (which he's been taking advantage of by killing cities while I fight off the massive armies) but other than that, warbosses and some random forces he doesn't have too much of an army. Guessing his 2nd city getting destroyed hit him pretty hard. I think the enemy is throwing some stuff at him. The necrons seem to be engaging him the most of all enemy armies. I guess he did just build a morkanaut though.

roboemperor wrote:

Voss wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Seems kinda dishonest to say that it's a Civ game with features removed. It's a Civ game with different features, and ones that are more appropriate to the setting

No, because they didn't bring in any new or different features. That would be dishonest, since they removed genre staples and didn't replace them with anything.

Gladius is a turn based RTS game. The only "genre staple" they removed is the real-time.

Its a turned based Real Time Strategy game?
That's both ridiculous and obviously wrong.

Also, contrary to what the company itself claims:

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War brings you to a world of terror and violence. Four factions will engage in a brutal war for dominance over the planet’s resources. In the first turn-based 4X strategy game set in Warhammer 40,000 you will lead one of four unique factions.

So, no. Not unless you think the devs are actively, repeatedly lying about the nature of the game, especially when they break down what 4X means on the Steam page.
Also whatever group gave the game a _4X_ Game of the Year award. I doubt they were confused by the difference between a 4X and an RTS.

roboemperor wrote:

Voss wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Seems kinda dishonest to say that it's a Civ game with features removed. It's a Civ game with different features, and ones that are more appropriate to the setting

No, because they didn't bring in any new or different features. That would be dishonest, since they removed genre staples and didn't replace them with anything.

Gladius is a turn based RTS game. The only "genre staple" they removed is the real-time.

Well no, according to Steam it's marketed as a 4X game which as a 4X game, is incredibly shallow with no depth outside basic resource management and turn based movement.

What they set out to achieve and what the outcome actually is are two very different things.

I think we'll just need to agree to disagree. You obviously enjoy the game, that's great! But I gave it another go and I didn't enjoy it at all.

If I wanted RTS, I can go back to early DoW. For proper 4X there are much better examples such as Endless Legend/Space, Civ and Masters of Orion etc.

I think gladius is a fun game. Is it technically a 4X game? No. I think that stands for explore, expand, exterminate and something else. It has those but generally 4X has diplomacy and that is lacking but I'm totally ok with that for 40k. Gladius is far less an rts game. If I had to say it's more a turn-based strategy but it is very similar to a 4X game. I suppose we'll just have to live with 3 X's which makes gladius sound like a porno now ;P.

Does this have eldar in it?

I hope its not as disappointing as DOW 3 game was lol.