Slitherine Announces Gladius - Relics of War

Just a few hours left til the DLC drops. Hefty patch notes out:

Some personal highlights
(Hiding descriptions of Tyranid behaviour if you want to go in blind)

  • Feed Upon The Planet: Cities and Malanthropes consume tile biomass and strip the ground down to bedrock.
  • Prey Adaptation: By defeating and consuming enemies, Tyranids evolve better ways of beating them next time. Enemies defeated in the area of a Malanthrope generate research points.
  • Instinctive Behaviour: Units outside the range of a synapse creature revert to their instinctive behaviour until contact is re-established. Whilst in range of a synapse link, units are immune to morale effects. The Hive mind’s attention can be focused to temporarily override a unit’s instinctive behaviour.
  • Added unique barks for the majority of units instead of having all units of a faction share the same ones.
  • Added several pieces of new flavor text scattered throughout the game.
  • Restored AI troop variety.

But this is worrisome:

  • Disabled healing, movement and sight artefacts until better solutions can be found and implemented.

Wonder what that’s about …

That seems really strange. How big an effect is that on the game?

Fighting over Artefacts is a big deal, these are 3 of the more important ones too.

I can only guess their effect made the Tyranids OP or something. Strange that they couldn’t just find som in-lore reason why they didn’t work for them or something like that if that’s the case…

Anyway, it’s out now, and I’m getting it :-)

Just to clarify, Healing Movement and Sight aren’t disabled, the randomly generated “Artefacts” that generate boons to your entire faction in those catagories have been disabled from appearing randomly on the map (so the other Artefacts will just be more commonly enountered than before, like the one that grants +10% damage). I don’t know why those Artefacts were taken out of the mix per se, probably like @FreeTheGluten mentioned they were important ones for being very powerful, but I never noticed in my Vs. AI games them being better than the others (or worse). All Artefacts are worth capturing and protecting, in my book, but I hope they can bring them back soon, as more things (not less) in the RNG map generation is always better.

Great idea. Have them to where we can bring them back and plug them into our city. Totally new mechanic that I just thought of just now.

(I realize that is not what you were saying)

The Tyranids feel great thus far. I’ve only mucked around with them for a bit, but having them mob up around my Prime and Warriors is very thematic. The little fellows are unimpressive individually, but they keep coming, and the Prime is a wrecking ball for sure.

Good. I literally waited for this DLC to get into this game for the first time, and now was concerned that they effectively hamstrung it because of some bug.

It’s just part of my personality - I hate features being pulled from games. But maybe if it does not affect the core, I’ll give it a try.

Woohoo! I probably won’t play it for a few weeks, but just bought it. Maybe by then they’ll have figured out whatever they need to figure out with the relics?

I tend to think that the listed relics are way more powerful than the other relics. I’m sure they’ll replace them with something. I don’t feel their loss in the game.

They listed the artefact change under balance, so my guess is they found that grabbing and holding those artefacts, when they’re present, is too strong for the fact that they’ll often fall into your lap due to map generation.

Looking forward to taking this for a spin next weekend.

Those artifacts were in fact pretty damn OP, especially for certain factions. Plus, they were stackable so if you had 2 movement artifacts all your 3-movement dudes are moving at 5 per turn, which is pretty broken. Same thing with the healing. These bonuses were universally applied to all your units regardless of location, and they tended to pile on a front-runner effect: get big, grab artifacts, get faster, more heal-y, and longer LOS, and then get bigger and bigger, unstoppably.

My own preferred fix is to bring the artifacts back, but with a radius of effect, such as 5 or 6 tiles. That would make them very useful, but would not confer a game breaking advantage for the entire map.

Tried the Tyrranids a bit today. Pretty interesting faction, very much a close range faction like the Orks, but even more so. They seem to require a fair amount of micromanagement to use well, but can do some pretty interesting stuff.

Malanthropes devouring biomass is just precious. I love seeing them floating behind my horde, alternating between quietly learning and ruining the world. More biomass! We must consume!

It is a very unique faction with some pretty interesting ideas. They seem really strong if a bit finicky. You really, REALLY need to plan out your turn’s movement so that synapse range doesn’t bite ya. Not knowing who is going to die where really changes things too. I can definitely see why they are “hard.” Must buy DLC.

The Hive Tyrant is just…wow. Huge movement range due to his wings, massive synapse radius, great powers and a total beatstick in combat. Absolutely worth the research, he’s the true leader of the swarm, the primes are just placeholders.

So I love this game, and I greatly respect the design of the Tyranid faction: they are a mostly melee swarm than captures the flavor quite well. However, I just find the 'Nids too damn fiddly to really enjoy playing. I prefer the other factions. It’s a personal preference, not a knock on the game, but the whole synapse mechanic ends up being more finicky/annoying than interesting after a few turns. Part of the issue is that both the visual depictions of the 'Nid units as well as their icons all look alike to me, so it’s hard to keep track of which of my swarm are the sheep and which are the shepherds.

So, technically speaking, a good quality DLC, but it just doesn’t click with me personally.

Oh well, I am still looking forward to more factions.

The DLC still provides you a new faction to fight against, so at least there’s that!

That’s actually exactly why I picked it up - I will try them at some point (I haven’t even played all four factions yet, I think the Guardsman faction is the one from the base game I have yet to start a game as, and I didn’t get far down the Ork tech tree, but they are fun) I mostly just wanted the extra spicy variety when I play vs. 3 AI on a small map.

I’m having fun with them; my new favourites, I think. Just make sure that every swarm you send out has at least one synapse creature with them. They’re powerful, too, so why wouldn’t you have the synapse creatures accompany your grunts?

I finished my first game with these guys. I’m not clear on how the Malanthropes work. Do they always give research if they are in range? If you have 2 do you get more? What is the point of eating biomass on a hex? It costs influence but doesn’t give resources. Is it just a scorched earth thing? That’s not really eating if it is. It’s more like bio napalm.