"I got married to the widow next door
She's been married seven times before
And every one was an 'Enery
She wouldn't 'ave a Willie or a Sam"
Herman's Hermits - I'm Henry VIII, I Am
I had planned this as a simple assessment of Warhammer: Forty Thousand: Gladius: Relics of Overextended Titles: Chaos Space Wallpapers: Tyranid Centerfold Edition, but its particular brand of mediocrity suggests wider observations and hell, I've never stayed on topic before so why start now?
Gladius is a simplified 4X adaptation of one of the most famous squad-management game systems and while I'd dreaded wasting my money even on sale, I can't entirely bash it. It does a few things right.
Hey, anyone remember that old game Starcraft? In addition to a surprisingly bearable pulp SF plot, full multiplayer support in the 28k modem era and a decent grasp of escalation, it also raised the bar in its genre with factions that were different not just cosmetically but also in significant details of their infrastructure. While this ran into constant balance issues (look up the original meaning of "zerg rush" - the six zergling rush) it was still more than its contemporaries could offer, or its successors dared to. Gladius is one of the few to rise to that long-standing challenge.
The chaos marines, for instance, need to sacrifice starter units for economic bonuses and their human contingent can get "rewarded" for scoring killing blows by being demonically mutated. Most of the time this results in side-grade cannon fodder... but when you get lucky, you get really lucky. I got that Daemon Prince, an end-game unit, on turn 12 and proceeded to mop up half the map. The orks in turn need to keep fighting constantly to secure the influence resource you'll need to expand and recruit heroes. Necrons regenerate constantly and require no food but are limited to building cities on a few select tiles, and tyranids use a highly simplified economy centered on food but need to expand more than others while maintaining tightly clustered armies. I've had quite a bit of fun failing to grasp each race's weaknesses. That incredibly lucky turn 12 boss summon? I still managed to lose it later on. To explain how, let's sidetrack to that quintessential 4X title, Stellaris.
Gladius doesn't have trade deals, but it goes even farther in permanently penalizing you for momentary inattention. Just as in Stellaris, any individual deficit will sap your income of all kinds, but Gladius taxes you to a near freeze and lacks the gross correction mechanism of an "interstellar market" with the result that if you ever dip into negative numbers for more than a single turn, you may as well quit. You will not recover for a hundred turns. Even if you have compensating resource buildings already queued, by the time they become active they too will be penalized. Moreover, Gladius' version of the city "happiness" metric, here termed loyalty, carries a disproportionate weight on every facet of your economy and is so heavily reduced by city sprawl that, once again, you can find your entire economy gridlocked in only a couple of turns.
Among other good and bad points, Gladius is a barely painted-over version of Proxy Studios' older 4X Pandora: First Contact, but it does show improvement in at least one area: the AI, which is now capable of mounting decisive offensives, will retreat its units to heal, focus fire and abuse artillery cover and even gradually switch priorities over the course of a game depending on who shows up near its cities. Unfortunately, it still cheats. Not by the same crass resource advantages as in Pandora (though their early armies still indicate a hidden starting bonus) but mainly by metagaming against you.
If you can't tell what's happenning there, the red and yellow computers are leapfrogging each other to reach my units and mine alone. In fact there's a third computer, blue, to the east on the minimap which was getting in on the action until I pushed it back. The whole dogpile was kicked off by neutral units spawning to attack me due to my quest, which makes this four factions at once launching a coordinated offensive against me in a game supposedly void of alliances. Granted, this is a rare occurrence, as they'll usually fight each other in the fog of war so long as you're out of sight and routinely eliminate each other, but the developers obviously still felt the need to lean on yet another crutch of artificial difficulty.
Of course, the AI might be said to be of little consequence, given Gladius is clearly built as a multiplayer game, and there's the rub. Much like Star Ruler 2, it trades away the strongest points of its genre-in-name to torture 4X strategy into a game of thumb war: struggling to stay on top from moment to moment with no long-term planning. It wants to leverage the grimdark "feels" of WH40K to become a new Supreme Commander: constant unit production, constant resource building production, constant spam of every kind... and there's so much wrong with that notion I barely know where to start.
In the first place, it's hard to think of a genre so poorly suited to multiplayer as 4X, which thrives on player management of increasingly overwhelming amounts of resources and units. Waiting for a dozen players to each manage a hundred cities and units for a thousand turns is a daunting proposition, and Gladius' strictures placed on expansion are obviously meant to sever end-game sprawl into just 3-4 cities and 20-ish units. But more than that, its hobbled interface and the severe penalties on resource deficit require you to give constant commands instead of planning a hundred turns in advance as a strategist should. Together with the lack of interface support for long-distance movement and long-term progression, this all points to deliberately removing foresight from the equation, rewarding reactive and not proactive gameplay. In other words a "strategy" title for those who don't want to strategize... too much. An attempt to bring turn-based mechanics down to the button-mashing real-time norm. A 4X bereft of three of its Xes: little or no exploration, expansion or exploitation but plenty of extermination.
So how well has this attempt at stealing Starcraft's spotlight worked out?
That's Gladius' multiplayer match list at what I can only consider peak hours, early evening in the Americas. Here's Stellaris at exactly the same time:
Amazing.
Turns out that crippling a 4X game into a petty, streamlined, custom-tailored, quick and dirty multiplayer version has about the same multiplayer success rate as building a full-size 4X game that can fuel month-long campaigns and just slapping a multiplayer option onto it as an afterthought. Buying a worse product for a specific purpose is the same as buying its fundamentally better competitor and repurposing it.
I've been enjoying Gladius' interdiction-heavy tactical side, its multifaceted economics, some of its better music tracks, even its writing, as its quest flavor text is the first (maybe second) satisfying exposure I've ever had to Warhammer's young adult "big dudes with big guns" cheesetastic setting. I've especially been enjoying sussing out each race's particular economic and combat dynamics. But as I win a game or two with each race I find no reason to repeat the experience, whereas Stellaris and Planetfall are providing me with years' worth of replay value. Every new 4X, role-playing or squad management game now should be asking itself what it can offer that Planetfall doesn't.
Even unit customization is conspicuously absent from Gladius, considering that as I recollect from the one guy back in high school who collected space marines, customizing your units with new weapons has always been one of Warhammer's core selling points! Even the other computer adaptations which lack customization give you options between "ork wif blasta" or "ork wif choppa" or whatnot. I find this lapse most perplexing of all in light of Gladius being summarily pasted over the older game Pandora, as Pandora itself already featured a built-in modular unit design system inspired by Alpha Centauri! What. The. Fuck! You copied everything over to your new product... except for the biggest selling point they had in common?
The more I look at Gladius, the more misconceived it appears to the point of deliberate self-sabotage. I can see the appeal of computerized Warhammer multiplayer. It's a PvP game to start with. But turn-based games always suffer from the tedium of waiting for your enemy's moves. Why pile onto that with the slowest-paced strategy genre of all, 4X? Hell, strategy gamers of all people should be familiar with the precept of playing your strengths, not your weaknesses. Warhammer is synonymous in gamers' minds with squad tactics. So why am I not seeing a viable online version, as Magic: the Gathering has done with Arena, of bringing a bunch of customized Tyranids and Chaos Marines to the virtual table and duking it out turn by turn without tacking on any other genre's gimmickry?
Granted, Games Workshop seems to have tried repeatedly back in the '90s with flubs like Chaos Gate. Since then they've instead been licensing their IP to anyone who'll have it, acting like they're hoping to retire on a thousand seeping trickles of royalties. Their biggest success has been what... Dawn of War? Followed maybe by Warhammer Online. Granted, Games Workshop also suffered one of the worst rip-offs in the game industry from Warcraft and Starcraft - if Blizzard actually paid the royalties it logically owes, they'd be set. But I can't figure out why the WH/40K I.P. mainly serves derivative genre adaptations, with the most faithful representations being shoestring fare like Armageddon or slapdash nonsense like Sanctus Reach. Why not corner the market in your own squad management niche, where the only serious competition would come from XCOM?
The only explanation I can think of is that they're still managing to market so many $80 plastic toys that serious big budget computer adaptations would actually water down GW's main source of revenue.
Which, if true... is frankly amazing in itself.
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