So,
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War released today. Being a WH40K 4X game, I thought it’d probably be relevant to the interests of a number of people here. The short and lazy way of describing it is Civ: 40K with a hint of Endless Legends. There are some notable differences and departures from Civ though.
Before I go any further I should note I’ve only got half an hour or so in the game at this point (along with watching a couple youtube videos), so I can’t really speak to whether it’s actually
good or not. It’s a Slitherine game, from the dev team that did
Pandora: First Contact, so adjust your expectations accordingly. What I can and will speak about is a rundown of the mechanics and features of the game (disclaimer: I’m not great at brevity :p).
ABOUT THE GAMEFirst thing to note is that although it’s billed as a 4X game, it focuses a lot more heavily on the eXterminate ‘X’ (their marketing missed the opportunity to relabel this eXterminatus) than the other 3. Most obviously they took the well known “only war” tagline to heart and so there’s no diplomacy of any kind in the game (well, you can assign players to teams during game setup, but they’re fixed once the game starts). There’s also no trade, culture, religion, etc, which isn’t super surprising for a 40K game but obviously it means fewer layers and options to the game. It’s probably best to view it as a war game with 4X elements, rather than a straight up 4X game.
So, the other stuff:
FACTIONSAt launch the game has 4 factions to choose from:
Astra Militarum (aka Imperial Guard),
Space Marines (far as I can tell they don’t specify which chapter, though I think the selection pic is Ultramarines),
Orks, and in a somewhat unusual choice, the
Necrons. There’s been rumblings that other factions will be added as DLC; presumably how many and how soon depending on how well the game sells.
The factions each have their own tech tree (well, more of a tech road, more on that later) and obviously their own set of units.
They also have some differences in their mechanics, strengths, weaknesses, etc. The most obvious one being city building, with the Necrons limited to only building cities on tiles that contain a Necron Tomb and the Space Marines unable to build cities after their starting city (although they can drop single-tile fortresses to claim the bonuses from special resource tiles). Astra Militarum and Orks get the standard build wherever options. They also treat resources (Food, Ore, Energy, Influence) a little differently from each other, along with various bonuses and features specific to each faction.
Here’s some cropped screenshots of the faction selection screens to illustrate:
CITIESCities work mostly the same as in other 4X games: you pick a location based on the resources of the surrounding tiles and then build improvements to generate more resources and construct units. But there are some differences in the details.
First of all, cities don’t start with any tiles under their control (besides the central one), you spend production time and resources to claim surrounding tiles. Also, most tiles don’t produce resources in and of themselves; there are scattered special resource tiles that will produce e.g. 2 food per turn (which can be captured by units as well as cities, although cities extract more of a bonus if you get them that way), but most tiles will just have a percentage bonus (or penalty) to one or more resource types e.g. an Arctic tile might be -20% food, +20% research.
Unlike other 4X games, city pops aren’t assigned jobs like farmer or miner and aren’t placed to work tiles per se, rather each building you build has to be manned by 1 pop. Actual resource production comes from the buildings themselves, modified by the bonuses of the tile they’re placed on. Each tile has a limited number of building slots, usually 2 or 3, and each building has to be placed on a tile with an available slot.
When it comes to unit production, by default a city can’t produce any units. You first have to research and then build one of the unit production buildings – a barracks equivalent for infantry, a garage equivalent for vehicles, and another for heroes (there might be a couple more further into the tech tree, I’m not sure). One thing I really like is that those buildings each have their own production queue, so your city can be building a new farm at the same time as you are training a unit of Guardsmen at the same time as you’re building a Leman Russ, all constructing in parallel (although if you’re building 2 Leman Russ, they’d be the usual one after the other). It costs resources as well as time to build/train units though, so you'll need a good economy to keep that much parallel construction going for any length of time.
Oh, and there’s no capturing cities, you just destroy them.
UNITS / COMBATAs you’d probably hope from a 4X that dumps things like diplomacy, the units and combat are slightly more detailed than a lot of the 4X games that Gladius uses as its template (to a point anyway, no Age of Wonders style tactical battles or anything like that). Units don’t just have a power rating and hitpoints, they have an armour value, a morale value (losing morale reduces damage output), and one or more weapons each of which have damage, number of attacks, accuracy, armour penetration and a range (and apparently an ammo count for some weapons).
For units that represent a squad there’ll be a number of weapons relating to the number of entities in the unit – as it takes damage the number of weapons available (and thus damage output of the unit) decreases.
One fairly big difference from other games is units don’t trade blows when you attack – you only deal damage when you attack and don’t take any damage while doing so. So if you send your Ork Boyz unit into melee against e.g. a Catachan Devil, they can attack it without worrying about casualties… at least until it’s the Devil’s turn when it’ll probably murder them. The exception is Overwatch: if a unit doesn’t attack on its turn and has a ranged attack it can be placed in Overwatch, wherein it will attack the first hostile unit that comes into range (at this point I’m unsure if that always triggers or is just a chance to).
So for example, a full unit of those Ork Boyz have 6 Choppas which each do 1.1. damage, 2 attacks, 0 armour penetration, accuracy 8 (67%) and range 0 (i.e. melee), but also have 6 Sluggas which do 1.5 damage, 1 attack, 0 armour penetration, accuracy 4 (33%) and range 1. In Overwatch they’ll just shoot their Sluggas when an enemy moves next to them (range 1), but if they attack they’ll go into melee and use both their Sluggas as they run in along with their Choppas when they get there, doing much more damage. Obviously a similar thing would apply with a unit that has multiple ranged weapons each with different ranges – only the weapons in range when you attack will fire.
Units also have a range of traits (e.g. most Ork units are scavengers and get Ore from kills) and most have one or more special abilities either to start with or which can be gained from research later (e.g. Guardsmen have techs that give them medpacks, frag grenades, and krak grenades). Some abilities cost influence to use and most (all?) of them have a cooldown.
Units also level up as they get experience, and experience is shared when killing enemy units (unsure at this point if that’s shared between any that were nearby, or specifically any that did damage).
There’s also (generic) hero units you can recruit which get points to purchase/upgrade abilities as they level, and can also equip/buy items found in ruins or from the trader Resource tiles.
OTHER STUFFOther misc stuff to know about:
It’s hex based, one unit per tile.
The game’s equivalent of Civ’s barbarians takes the form of wildlife and renegade units that roam the map, including some ‘nest’ type buildings that spawn units periodically. From what I can tell the early game is mostly spent battling them, before you ever see an enemy faction. I don’t think there’s anything special to be gained from killing them (besides levelling your units), but they’ll harass your units if you don’t.
Settler type units are combat capable and usually have other abilities (possibly added via research) outside of settling cities to provide support in battle.
As I mentioned way back near the start, the research tree is more of a research road. It comes in 10 tiers, with 5 or 6 techs per tier. To unlock a tier you research any 2 techs from the previous tier. For the most part there’s no prerequisites, besides practical things like you can’t research the tech to produce a hero unit without first researching the tech to produce the hero-producing building. I think I saw/heard someone say that each tech you research slightly increases the cost of all remaining techs, but I’m not sure about that. Techs generally unlock new units and buildings, or upgrade existing ones with better stats or new abilities.
There’s water, but no naval units (though there are air units). Terrain can block passage to ground units (e.g. water, cliffs) and line of sight for ranged attacks (e.g. forests). The game has the equivalent of alien fungus in the form of Wire Weed that damages units that end (start?) their turn there.
You can only move once per turn even if you didn’t use up all your movement points – no edging forward 1 hex at a time to reveal enemies in the fog of war before committing to your full move (at least not without doing it over multiple turns).
The graphics are serviceable, but kind of dull and a bit washed out looking – a lot of greys and browns. Some of the units look pretty cool though (e.g. the Canoptek Spider). The UI’s decent enough – pretty clear and well presented; nothing’s annoyed or confused me with it so far. There’s no voiceovers outside of the intro cutscenes, though units do make comments in the form of floaty text above their heads.
Victory conditions are either to destroy all the other players, or complete your faction’s quest line. The quest line option tells a story for each faction, consisting of missions like “Research and build a Manufactorum” or “go kill these 3 units” (with a bunch of contextual fluff text of course), usually with a resource reward for completion of each step.
Well, that’s about everything I can think of, though I’ve probably missed some things. I’ll likely do a much shorter post of my thoughts on how much I’m enjoying the game (or not) once I’ve got some real playtime under my belt, but in the meantime if anyone has any questions on game features and mechanics I can try to answer them.
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Topic: Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War (aka Civ:40K, sorta) (Read 3192 times)