2018 wasn’t the busiest year for strict 4X releases but it did throw the community a rather large and explosive curveball: the release of Warhammer 40k: Gladius – Relics of War (Gladius), developed by Proxy Studios and published by Slitherine Ltd. Gladius was noted for its tight, combat-focused gameplay, well-implemented asymmetry between the four playable factions, suitably gritty looking graphics depicting a bleak and battered world alive with deadly flora and hostile wildlife, and a good AI capable of some surprisingly human-like tactical decision making.
With all this held together with tight mechanics that sacrificed the thematically incompatible concept of diplomacy for the notorious endless warfare of the 41st millennium, from the first turn until the last, eXplorminate liked it (see Nate’s excellent and comprehensive review here) and it was comfortably voted in with a large margin as our Game of the Year 2018.
In the eighteen months or so since release Proxy have released several significant DLC updates in the form of two complete factions: the monstrous bio-organic Tyranid Hive Fleets and the traitor legions of the Chaos Space Marines, followed by a cross-faction add-on called the Fortification Pack which adds heavier units designed to bolster mid to endgame arsenals.
I’ll give a short summary of each DLC before moving on to how the whole game fares now, after months of patching and balancing.
Tyranids
The Tyranids play very differently to the base game races owing to some unique faction mechanics. Firstly, the Hive Mind extends control over its subordinate hordes using a psychic connection emitted by synapse creatures to nearby forces and when cut off from these leaders will suffer a varied range of penalties collectively called Instinctive Behaviour. Tactical positioning of your forces becomes doubly important playing as the Tyranids, and selective elimination of synapse creatures and aggressive area denial aiming to push their minions out of range of this psychic control network become key tactics in whittling down their overwhelming numbers.
I quickly learned that some of the earlier tier Tyranid units, particularly the synapse units such as the Tyranid Warriors, are generally less useful than others for this role and under-performed for their resource and technology cost.
For this faction, biomass is a single resource replacing both food and ore. Everything is food to the Tyranids, even their own troops who can be reclaimed back into your organic cities for a production boost at the cost of some influence (and you really must keep this up constantly to stay competitive). Indeed when everything is running according to plan the Tyranid forces will strip a planet of every animal, vegetable and mineral, right down to its very bedrock, before sucking it all back up into their bloated, sinewy hive-ships and splurging off across the galaxy to find their next meal.
In-game this is represented by the Tyranids equivalent to the combat-worker unit, the Malanthrope, who drifts across the map and can strip each tile for a significant bonus to biomass, leaving bare rock in its place and serving to deny access to valuable resources. As most factions are heavily reliant on food and ore, salting the earth in this way can deny them access to strategically important city sites whilst fuelling your own war-machine. Furthermore, prey killed in the presence of a Malanthrope generate extra research points, representing Hive adaption to ever-changing conditions on the battlefields of Gladius.
Tyranid city population size is restricted, balanced by a less harsh penalty for city count, meaning you’re intended to play relatively wide: I say relatively because the game still punishes early expansion with a rather crippling loyalty malus that increases with city size, and the Tyranids are doubly subject to this and require you to manage more and smaller cities. Taken together though, with this creeping advance across the planet, eerie Malanthropes stripping biomass from the earth watched over by towering Primes, Hive Tyrants, lumbering bio-organic long range guns and attendant masses of smaller minions, Proxy have successfully captured the horror of a Tyranid invasion like no other Warhammer game has before. And in a 4X game, of all things!
Chaos Space Marines
The Chaos Space Marines specialty rules are less complex and closely align with the original faction mechanics introduced in the base game, meaning they’re significantly easier to jump in and play with than the Tyranids are. There are no resource replacements here, relying on food and ore much like the Orks and Astra Militarum do. Instead, the player is introduced to a series of boons, blessings and curses specific to the four great Chaos Powers themselves. 40K fans, armed with knowledge of the lore will feel themselves in familiar territory here: they function much like the faction specific bonuses and upgrades you’d expect in a standard 4X or real time strategy game.
As with the Imperial Guard’s edict system of the base game, resources such as food, research and production can gain a temporary and rather gruesome boost by sacrificing your population to one of the attendant powers. Tzeentch bestows faster research and production at your Warp Forges, Nurgle grants extra food and growth for a quick population spurt, Khorne increases military production and Slaanesh boosts the influence and loyalty output of your respective structures. There are few power specific units, such as the infamous Khorne Berzerkers, but targeting certain tech-tree unlocks allows your unaligned units to be granted Marks of Chaos, one per turn for each Power, bestowing bonuses suitably befitting their foul patron.
Boons of Chaos are a series of unlockable random bonuses that affect your heroes, providing powerful stat upgrades and abilities. The theme here is customisation of your base forces: the Chaos Space Marine roster can be tailored to a specific playstyle, or modified ad-hoc to counter specific threats encountered during the war. They are a versatile, aggressive roster with a mix of strong melee focused units backed up with powerful but erratic armoured and long ranged options, and whilst they lack the tactical insertion and long reach of their ancient foe the Space Marines, the units they do field are every bit as devastating.
I’ve one minor gripe in an otherwise solidly put together set of content. I’m not particularly keen on how the Daemon Prince is implemented: it can, and will, randomly erupt from one of your cultists, Chaos Marines or a selection of the other base units right after killing an enemy. In my very first game, a unit of petty cultists killed off one of the weaker natives and BOOM! a slavering Daemon Prince exploded into life!
Lore-wise, I struggle to see why anything less than a great Chaos Lord or Sorcerer would be fitting of such a blessing. They’re not the strongest of all the hero units but they’re powerful and considering they’re free and can arrive at any point in the battle, it can give you a significant advantage early on. It’s not particularly unbalanced, and not really a huge suspension of disbelief required in a realm of absolute fantasy, but it is a little odd and might be explained perhaps because Dawn of War implemented the “Chaos Lord power-up creates Chaos Daemon Prince” many years before.
Fortification Pack
This $5 DLC added a defensive unit to each faction, for a total of six new units: the Aquila Macro-Canon allows the Space Marines to deploy a massive static fortification to the battlefield, equipped with a long-range gun, granting them some much-needed artillery. Since this can be deployed right next to enemy bases, I found it useful in shortening the time it can take to crack a heavily defended enemy city and draw fire from your less resilient city assault units.
The Astra Militarum get the Void Shield Generator to protect troops and valuable resources. The Ork Big Mek is a new hero with some interesting abilities designed to support vehicle and range unit assaults. The Chaos Space Marines’ Noctilith Crown placeable fortification shields your units and damages enemy psykers, a situational bonus at best. Gauss Pylons are the Necrons’ range 4 defence turret which also grants adjacent allied units an invulnerable bonus. Finally, the Tyranid Biovores act like a living artillery unit, producing spore bomb units you can kamikaze into enemy lines. Not an essential DLC by any means but I think the price is pretty fair and I found some of these units effective counters to the long, grueling deadlocks that occasionally occur over contested and difficult territory. More on this later.
New Factions Together
As with the release of the base game and the unit picks for each race, the Tyranids and Chaos factions have both had their vast unit rosters selectively raided, ensuring a counter to each of the major unit types in-game and providing ample choice for 40K lovers, whilst supporting the over-arching playstyle each one brings to the game.
Fans of the series will miss certain favourites for sure, but some of the most interesting and exciting 40K protagonists are present and accounted for: from the horrifying, permanently mutating, ordinance-belching giants of the Chaos Space Marine Obliterator cult to the equally devastating firepower of the monstrous bio-organic artillery piece, the Tyranid Tyrannofex, Warhammer 40K’s rich lore is well represented and each unit supposedly has its function. Regular and tentative patches have sought to address the occasional meta-game driven redundancies and balance issues that inevitably arise in any product featuring an increasingly large number of battlefield assets and with an active multiplayer scene.
All in all, the gameplay experience feels much as it did on release, but the overall quality of the gaming experience is significantly higher, clearly having benefited greatly from careful and regular updates.
I’m not really one for campaign play in 4X, which is fortunate because Gladius doesn’t bother with one, substituting in a series of faction specific quests which teach a reasonable trajectory through the tech tree and provide opportunity for some limited exploration into 40K’s rich background setting. The writing is concise, focused and descriptive for both faction updates, with the Chaos DLC really not holding back in describing in gruesome detail quite how horrible the Chaos Space Marines and their dreadful gods really are. More exposition fluff for each faction comes in the form of a dialogue received upon discovery of new technology: these are often wonderfully evocative, but the game is screaming out for more artwork to accompany these, particularly those that provide the player with new and exciting units to field.
Complaints Old and New
I’ll now address complaints made in the original review and subsequent discussion here at eXplorminate and see where Relics of War lies right now. Starting with Gladius Prime itself, the procedurally generated playfield is generally very good, but I still feel there could be some more variety in the way the game generates it’s maps: looking very much like the setup in the excellent Age of Wonders series, there are a series of options in setup to tweak the relative proportions of forest tiles, rivers, volcanic regions and so on. This will certainly add some replay value, and since the excellent tactical battles in Gladius are strongly tied to the varied map tiles and their relative composition, you can have some fun with tailoring your perfect battlefield.
I still worry there might not be enough options yet to truly make any genuinely memorable maps, as Relics of War seems to play the map generation fairly safely. In its defence, Gladius Prime can be seeded as a mostly forest planet, an arctic tundra, a gasping desert wasteland and so on, and the game handles this quite well. This can significantly affect game balance as resources are generated from both the ground tiles and the “features” tiles for bonuses and allowing for extremes can boost or limit certain factions by: players wishing to constrain themselves to a certain type of playstyle, or increase the difficulty by playing a faction less suited to the terrain, might have a lot of fun here with some careful experimentation with the settings.
The way the AI copes with the more extreme settings during map generation is not perfect. On more than one occasion, when set to small landmass on a medium or larger map size, the game created a battlefield featuring a huge expanse of mostly impassable ocean tiles in the centre, leaving the majority of the landmass formed into long, thin peninsula wrapped around the north and south edge. This made a nice change to the usual “bit of everything Pangaea” Gladius will generate by default but it turned out the AI wasn’t so great at exploiting that, at least on Hard difficulty where I spent much of my time with the game. I’d often fight off an initial exploratory expedition of low tier fodder, made a concerted push towards their HQ and find they’d be locked in mortal combat with another rival faction on their other flank and exhausted themselves to the point of defeat, leaving me with little to fight. (During the writing of this article, a patch was released to increase the size of these outcrops).
This isn’t a problem exclusive to this game and I suspect might signal good game balance and a fair AI rather than any specific fault with the way the game plays out, as the AI is mostly playing fair and fighting its own threats on several fronts. Players will need to play with various combinations of map types, difficulty settings and AI team settings to find something that challenges you, but it’s all too common to find the AI factions duking it out amongst themselves and barely sparing you more than a few scouting raids for a hundred turns until you’ve landed on their doorstep with the 40K equivalent of Operation Barbarossa whilst they’re tied up fighting a Battle of the Somme style trench battle with their closest AI neighbour.
I like that the game seems to play fair like this, but it doesn’t always make for a fun experience if you’ve spent several hours clearing out the natives only to find the war has ended without too much interaction with the main factions. At other times, this is merely an appetizer for an epic battle with whichever of the AI races managed to fight off their rivals and which proves much more challenging and enjoyable.
Strong AI
The AI always felt quite strong to me but regular updates have increased its competency, and after some official post-release tweaking by game-AI modder Ail, it can be quite the challenge. To preserve your battle lines and limit casualties it is essential to rotate your units as they become damaged and rest them up, replacing them with fresh meat for the grinder. Unit veterancy is powerful in Gladius and keeping your troops alive is essential. Nate noticed that on release, the AI didn’t always manage this, sometimes throwing units forwards against odds it couldn’t hope to match but this has now improved somewhat.
The computer can probe your defences and attack where you are weak, generally won’t advance carelessly into unknown terrain with lone units and will retreat if defeat is likely, often appearing back on the front a handful of turns later sporting a counter to that blob of tanks you thought would win you the game. The native units likewise generally favour survival over suicide attacks and each sub-faction of natives have their own aggravation level, meaning you can often leave them unmolested and be rewarded in kind to advance your goals elsewhere.
This isn’t a golden rule and you’ll often see Chaos Cultists or Kroot Hounds throwing themselves at your city walls turn after turn when they should probably be retreating. The wildlife can be a significant threat and must be handled with caution: suicidal Cultists won’t kill your base but swapped out for ancient-era Kastelan robots and you have a potentially game-ending problem on your hands, and careless rapid exploration in the early game can lose you your starting units to mind-control attacks by Enslavers that guard Gladius’s many relics.
Graphics and Sound
I also echo Nate’s complaint that whilst the soundtrack is good with its suitably rusty sounding overdriven war-anthems, there’s still not enough of it. Not something I expect added at this stage, but it wouldn’t go unappreciated! The text dialogue from units can be amusing and it might be fun to see more of it too, although intrepid gamers could probably jump into the XML files and add their own, as pretty much everything in Gladius, bar the game logic, is open to modding in this way. Sadly, there still isn’t an army painter, a missed opportunity, but it presumably would have put unnecessary extra development time and pressure on what was originally just a two-man studio.
The battlefields of Gladius Prime and the denizens that fight on them are beautifully depicted: the unit models, cities and terrain are well detailed and lit, with nice little details like variable weather effects that change as you pan across the different biomes on the map. Some might find this detail somewhat distracting however; there is a case to be made for simplicity and clarity in strategy gaming to ensure relevant details can be quickly analyzed. Because of this high detail, Gladius can also become somewhat tiring to look at after extended sessions.
One visual representation of a critical game-play mechanic I initially found quite frustrating was the way cliff edges work to limit movement: if you’re playing quickly it can be easy to miss these different height markers and find your units marching the long way around or stuck. The options contain a handy coloured marker to highlight cliffs in orange (thanks Proxy!), so presumably, I wasn’t the only player to have this issue: I highly recommend leaving this on! Those minor complaints aside, Gladius looks amazing, and it’s remarkable to see a 4X with such great visuals!
Game Pacing
Relics of War allows for very fast-paced play despite handling dozens of combat units because of the excellent user interface, hotkeys and partly due to the relatively simple city management system. Despite this, games can still turn into a long, grueling slog ground out between creaking war machines fought over slowly shifting front lines that ebb and wane like the tide as units are retreated and replaced with fresh reserves: the Fortification DLC helped here, adding heavier ordinance designed to crack open holes in the enemy line and some static fortifications that either pound your enemies with very heavy guns or provide a buff to nearby defenders, but it can often feel like the war is literally never-ending.
Hardcore wargame enthusiasts of the Matrix/Slitherine variety won’t find this a problem and will enjoy this unique challenge (I can’t think of any other 4x game I’ve enjoyed that plays out quite like this one does), and Relics of War makes the process rather fun with the sheer number of tools at your disposal: as Chaos, I really enjoyed shuttling my newly minted Havocs, intended to counter some sudden armoured threat, all the way from your cities to the front line in Chaos Rhinos whilst their broken comrades limped their way to the back or flanking your opponents armoured lines with a fleet of flying Helldrakes.
Very heavily defended chokepoints can be penetrated with careful application of force coupled with the myriad special abilities and Trade Camp-purchased items available to your units, and you’re always just a few turns away from a new vital technology to break the deadlock. Notable for this kind of game, as there are counters for everything, simply racing for air units or some other singular tech won’t always be enough to ensure victory and keeps the game exciting to the end.
This suits me fine, however, I think that less-combat oriented 4X-fans straying into the fray and hoping for some respite from the endless maneuver may be less thrilled and as with most 4X titles some might perceive the endgame to drag, particularly once you have achieved map dominance and are finally whittling down the last few enemy cities. Endless war is what the Warhammer 40K universe promises, and Gladius sure delivers it, if you have the stamina and stomach for it!
To facilitate quick resolution of AI turns, where there can be dozens of attacks made in a single round, enemy units move and fight in rapid succession. I appreciate the effort to reduce waiting times but all too often multiple units will start their attacks off-screen before the animation is done for the previous one, causing you to miss the damage taken on both actions. Slowing down the animation speeds in the game options can help but at the expense of increasing the over-all playtime: I’d like to see this addressed because it’s my one main problem with the game and I think I’d prefer it if battles resolved in more organised groups to avoid missing any of the action.
Rapid update cycle
It is clear the developers are closely scrutinizing how their customers are playing their game: here’s just one small excerpt from a huge list of changes in a patch released at the back end of October:
“Reduced Malanthrope hitpoints from 16 to 12. Malanthropes were used to tank too many overwatch shots, which is contrary to their supportive role.”
This kind of exploit, beloved of strategy gamers the world over, might go unaltered by a less caring developer. This was one of several dozen significant balance changes in just one patch; at the time of writing there have been eight such updates since October 2019. This sentiment telegraphs the secret of Proxy’s success: deliberate, focused and diligent game design that doesn’t try to do too much but does what it does just right. I’ve not played any multiplayer as of yet, but I think this game will appeal to people looking for a game with a quick turn resolution time but with the potential for some very long, epic struggles.
Conclusion
Pulling off a tight, war-focused 4X like Gladius to such high acclaim, in a market over-saturated with both sci-fi 4X and high-quality turn-based tactical wargames is an impressive achievement, particularly for such a small development team. Proxy Studios have taken the legendarily grimdark 40K IP and forged it into a solid and popular title. I’m excited for the incoming Tau faction DLC and further development to see where this great game can go. Let’s see some Chaos Daemons and space elves next!
This game scores Recommended, and it’s very highly recommended at that. Relics of War only fell short of our highest score of Exemplary because it is closer described as a wargame than a traditional 4x and it won’t appeal to fans of the genre who might be put off by the constant and utterly relentless warfare, and whilst its mechanics are tight as hell and all work towards a fluid and consistent experience, it doesn’t quite innovate in any field. But don’t let this put you off: this is a must-play for anybody who enjoys turn-based tactical combat, and it truly is a unique gem of the 4x genre.
(On a personal note, I’m really pleased to see some of the very oldest content from the Warhammer 40K bestiary appear in-game. Many of the natives of Gladius Prime, such as the dastardly Enslavers, brain-egg injecting Psychneuein and the gargantuan Catachan Devils are all relics of war themselves, dating back to the original Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader ruleset and brought back some great memories!)
You Might Like This Game If:
- You want a 1UPT combat system that works
- You love the Warhammer 40,000 universe
- You need REAL Space Marines to crush the Xenos scum
- You think diplomacy should only come from the barrel of a gun/rifle/cannon
You Might NOT Like This Game If:
- You think combat is the worst part of a 4X game
- You want a bright and optimistic visual experience
- You prefer Orcs to Orks
- You want to play a peaceful, non-violent game
