We are Proxy Studios, developers of the upcoming 4X strategy videogame Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War. Ask us anything!

Hey

• will there be a campaign, can you chose who to play as in this campaign?
• Does the campaign have a story?
• what sort of play style should we expect from each race?

Hello, you will always start in a randomly generated world (with many configuration options), but each faction has a quest chain that tells their unique story on the planet.

That sounds pretty interesting and good for replay-ability.

Bar unit choice is there anything that separates the factions from each other. What makes them unique?

They're extremely asymmetrical. Broadly speaking they all differ in how they handle the economy and which special powers are at their disposal. There are more concrete examples in the other answers.

Can you tell us more about the story?

Before living memory, there was The War in Heaven, fought between the long-lived Old Ones and the jealous Necrontyr. In their mutual desperation to survive, the Necrontyr sacrificed their organic bodies to the Star Gods called the C’tan, thus becoming the mechanical Necrons, while the Old Ones created the species of the galaxy as we know it. They also left scattered relics of great value -- precious few of which still survive ...

This sounds very similar to endless legend. Inspiration?

Definitely, we take a look at all the advances across the 4X and other genres and try to integrate what we think fits and the expand upon it with our ideas. From Endless Legend it was definitely the quest system.

Will Space Marines get Chapter-exclusive units, Astra Militarum planet/regiment-exclusive units, Ork tribe-exclusive units and Necrons dynasty-exclusive units, or will the chapters, tribes, etcetera be seperate armies entirely?

We had so much to draw from for the base factions already so we didn't want to go there to begin with. I can see us explore that with expansions, but I don't have concrete answers right now. It could be done either way. We have to ask ourselves though, wouldn't we prefer an entirely new race rather than a little supplement, given how interesting they are? As a point of focus, we're currently prioritising entirely distinct factions for expansions, but we're not excluding adding special new units.

I would like to point out one thing, that is often disregarded by 40 K fans and deserves more mention. That is the crazy terrifying wildlife in the Warhammer universe. The sheer threat of it all and the focus on survival. From Psychneuein hatching larva out of vulnerable brains to Catachan Devils crushing you with their tails. We tried to do all of that justice. Gladius is not a piece of cake to walk around. And some of the -exclusive units that could be added to a playable faction or are of an entirely undone faction are sometimes found exploring the world or completing quests.

yeah im curious how that will take form in this or will we be able to choose colours atleast for the factions please dont force ultramarines

You will be able to choose a color and the models themselves don't have any Ultramarine symbology.

Why wasn’t it called Warhammer 40X? All the Xs stand for exterminate obviously.

Our writer has a curious sense of humour.

What is the largest unit available for each faction?

I'd say the Baneblade for Astra Militatum, the Stormraven Gunship for Space Marines, the Gargantuan Squiggoth for Orks, and the Tesseract Vault for Necrons!

oho so there’s a Titan expansion in the future? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

And as a quick & cheeky follow-up: Your previous game, Pandora: First Contact, was a pretty neat take on Sci-Fi Civilization (and arguably did a better job than Civ: Beyond Earth itself did). What key lessons have you taken from designing that game that you've applied to designing Gladius?

With Gladius we really wanted to focus on the combat side (due to the nature of the license and it being the part that got praise in Pandora), but at the same time keep an interesting and engaging economy that was less micro intensive than our previous title (but is still hard to master!). We added quest story lines for each faction to make the world feel more alive, which was something that Pandora was missing to some extent. Also, the dangerous wild life part at the start of the game is something we really liked in Pandora and kept in Gladius.

Something I really liked about Pandora was the random (or rather seemingly random) events that happened throughout the story; will there be events that affect production or units' effectiveness for a number of turns with flavour text?

I think this shines even further in Gladius than Pandora. Progressing through your faction's story causes new things to crop up and provides rewards for completing along with it: from making certain units stronger to providing instant or economic bonuses over time.

What worries me about this is that players may feel they have to go through the story to have an advantage over/keep up with the enemy. I'm glad you're still doing these events though!

I feel you. We've tried to make it optional but encourage it. You'll also be able to disable quests if that concerns you.

How is combat handled? Is like an RTS like Dawn of War or Total War where you spawn onto a battlefield and command your troops? Or is it more like the auto-resolve feature in Total War where you just need to make sure you have the most or strongest units?

Think more like Civilization!

The most important question. Will red wunz go fasta?

This is literally the Ork story quest name: "Chapter 5: Red Wunz Go Fasta".

are there any plans for mod/steam workshop support either on or after release?

You will be able to mod at release, you'll have to get your hands a bit dirty modifying xml files, but you can modify existing or create entirely new units, weapons, factions, abilities etc, and once we release our 3DS Max exporters even create new graphical assets. It's really the same way we work on the content. We tried to be as flexible and open from the start of development, but we didn't compromise on performance by using an interpreted language.

No Steam Workshop support for release though -- it would be nice to have, but it's sometimes tricky with licensed titles and we have our hands full right now. So I think we'll be looking at how best to support mod creations after release.

A couple quick requests related to this, from my experience modding Civ 6: clear documentation of the structure of your XML files, and a bit of flexibility with what numbers can be adjusted, would make modding much more accessible, as well as more open-ended. Having to constantly refer to player-made resources to make sure my formatting is correct is a pain, and a fair few of my ideas for Civ 6 were blocked by the fact that you can't specify how many Builder charges an Improvement uses, for example. The more things tweakable in the files, the better!

Would love to get you into the beta and hear your thoughts on how well Gladius mods right now. Shoot me your email if you're interested.

Many people, myself included, look at something like Distant worlds or Aurora and just switch off, whereas Fallen Enchantress and Endless games are very much "me".

If you had to rate your game on a 1-10 scale in terms of complexity, mechanics, learning curve and depth, what point are you aiming at?

We tried to keep it as easy to get into as possible -- we are huge proponents of intuitive usability and user experience.

That said, we went into a lot of detail with combat and units. Things like multiple weapons and ranges on individual units, special abilities, unit and weapon traits, hero units and hero items, we've went into combat into a larger degree than any other 4X planet game I know of. But it doesn't overwhelm you if you don't want to care about the particulars and just want to murder things.

Economy has a unique spin too, requiring you to place buildings on tiles and just stemming from the asymmetry of the factions.

So I'd like to say it's just unique enough to scratch an itch but familiar enough to not be repulsive, that's what we were going for, but you'll have to be the judge of it.

If you enjoyed the Endless games, it should be right up your alley.

You've said before that Games Workshop respect the lore and have been involved in Gladius' design. Are there any mechanics or features you wanted to add that GW said don't work in 40k when pitching the game to them?

They were very open with letting us take our own spin on it. Mechanics and features were generally not an issue, they wanted to allow us our vision and understood we've done it before.

The biggest points of contention that I can remember were finding a good compromise for how to bring economy into the universe where there is only war. For example, they were strongly against Space Marines having "food" and "ore", Space Marines just don't care much about them, it's above them. So now they have "requisitions". And we've taken that further in how they gather them so it's not just a syntactic difference. Their primary concern really is sticking to the lore and look; are the colors correct, is the vibe right, would that unit do that, is the symbology correct?

Getting on the same page exactly how Space Marines should look without Ultramarine or other chapter-specific symbology was also an interesting challenge.

Hullo there! My first question to kick things off would be to to ask is, "do you have any plans for future armies to be added, either as patches or DLC"? Your choice of having Necrons (when they've only appeared in the video games 3 times before - DoW: Dark Crusade, Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion and Dark Nexus Arena) was quite interesting; any chance of seeing lesser loved armies in the games such as Dark Eldar?

Hello, we do have planned to add additional factions, though they are not decided yet. Whatever factions we decide to go with in the end, we want to make sure that they provide a different and unique playstyle meshing nicely with the Gladius story.

On the subject of armies, what inspired you to make the Space Marines and Astra Militarum separate factions? Playing devil's advocate for a moment, it is true that the two can fight one another but would it not have been easier to have have them as one army and add another?

The Space Marines and Astra Militarum, while it's true that they're both part of The Imperium of Man, have extensively different roles and attributes in their army compositions. They have their own codices, fans and ways of play. We didn't think we would be able to give them enough justice if we had just made one faction out of it -- it would have been too many compromises we weren't prepared to make.

On top of the differences in units, in Gladius, Space Marines are restricted to one city, don't care for the distinction of food and ore and expand their empire and enforce their military prowess through outposts deployed from orbit, chapter tactics and other shock maneuvers, while Astra Militarum play much more conventionally as seen in 4X, relying on multiple cities, slower expansion, city-wide edicts, defenses and ranged firepower.

As part of the closed beta, I know I can't say much, but I just wanted you to know that you're doing a great job and the lessons you've learned from Pandora are obvious.

Will there be many different types of biomes?

Will there ever be a real diplomacy system?

How will you keep playthroughs variable? Only one winning condition and one quest line can lead to a lack of replayability.

Lastly, will there ever be a side-quest system? I think that would help with replayability, a la Endless Legend or Space 2, etc. Especially with such a rich lore like 40K.

Thank you so much Orcasare, that's very encouraging to hear. It makes the rough days worth it. <3

There's 6 biomes, each with a slight tilt in the resources it emphasises. Graphically they each have their own environmental effects and predispositions, from rain to tumbling dust. We're also exploring how far we want to go in limiting which neutral units appear in each biome.

No real diplomacy system, but you'll be able to choose starting teams. We've considered a few versions of it through development, but none of our partners felt that was worth the focus, and we've rather used our resources to make the bloodshed deeper.

We're hoping the complexity of the combat system, faction asymmetry and faction-specific storylines will provide enough replayability. What happens sometimes is that games forcefully add more victory conditions, even though they don't have a clear purpose and end up just being tilted towards fighting anyway, which I think we were guilty of in Pandora as well, so we wanted to avoid that and be clear.

Totally agree on the side-quests! We have some plans for that after release.

Where in the galaxy is Gladius Prime?

Is the Astra Militarum faction a PDF regiment?

Can you confirm which space marine chapter/ork tribe/necron dynasty the other factions will be?

Our loremaster says: "It's the main planet of the Gladius System, Segmentum Obscurus, Ixaniad Sector. It was first colonised late in 997.M41."

The factions are not of a specifically named regiment/chapter/tribe/dynasty. That allows us to have freer hands in coloring them and including both more generic and more chapter-specific units. Essentially we had to make a compromise in how far out to abstract a faction -- Imperium of Man / Space Marines / Ultramarines -- and we went with the middle ground.

What is the question you wish someone would ask you about this project? Like what are you dying for people to know about.

Oh, wow, what a great question.

It would have to be the merciless nature of the planet's habitat. We hate games that are too easy deep inside our core. Be prepared to lose a lot of Guardsmen.

Will there be space-based support in the game or is the premise that the factions are a bit isolated from their respective civilizations?

edit- i see in a previous comment mention that the space marines deploy outposts from orbit, so presumably the level of support from the space and the wider universe varies by faction? Presumably the necrons just teleport about as well

All factions are generally isolated. They've each come to Gladius in their own way and have their own reasons and motivations for being there.

For Space Marines in particular, they do have limited space-support due to a Battle Barge in low orbit. I'd hate spoil the rest -- it's revealed and explained throughout the game.

What % of the units in the codices are you implementing in the game? As in, will every unit from the codex be available for their faction in-game, or 80%, 50%, etc...

There's an average of 17,25 unique units per faction, some are not taken from the base codices, like the Baneblade or Thunderbolt. Feel free to calculate an average % from that at your discretion.

Hi guys! When is the game coming out??

Hey Panzer! Due to publisher policy we're unfortunately not able to give out the date. It shouldn't be a very long wait, but both Slitherine and we want to make sure we do as good of a job as we can, and not rush things.

In addition to this, how long will the gap between the end of the closed beta and the final release be? Will players be able to test right up until launch day?

Can't say for sure, but most likely going to be testing until very close to the release date. Any additional feedback in that period could allow us to get a better impression of what tweaks are still required right after release.

Your game is certainly on my watch list. Will my favorite Space Marine chapters have unique models or unique heroes?

Can I make my own Space Marine chapter?

Not out of the box, but you can mod the game, potentially make a new faction after your favourite chapter.

You can also of course rename your units as you produce them in-game.

Hello, Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to talk to us. I really appreciate your products and dedication to the fan base. My question for you folks is, do you pee in the pool? Thank you again for your time and I eagerly await your response.

Only the 33% of the time when I pretend to be 90 years old.

Hey Proxy studios.

So, I've seen your game and it looks very much like Civ 5/5.5. Though, I admit to not being a fan of Civ - I am a big fan of Warhammer.

What made you decide to go with x4 strategy instead of say RTS?

And also, are there any plans in upgrading the effects in the game ? I've seen some gameplay,and (in my opinion) the FX is really underwhelming when considering the magnitude of the destructive power of warhammer 40k...

There is already Dawn of War to scratch the RTS itch and we wanted to play to our strengths since we're already experienced in turn-based 4X.

Not sure exactly what you've seen, but there's definitely some huge explosions and devastating abilities appearing later in the tech trees. But we still have to be a bit careful with the scale of things since 4X games have this somewhat awkward split between the scale of the environment and the scale of units.

Are we going to get some magnificently awful amazing voice acting again?

I think it's not magnificently awful.

Best advice to future game designers/developers?

Create things and collaborate.

4X set after the fall of Cadia? Sweet. I persobally feel like the real USP of WHF and 40k were/are the breadth of different races, so it’s cool that you included Necrons in the base 4 - but would love to see Tau, Adeptus Mechanicus, Chaos, different kinds of Eldar, and the Tyranids!

My question is: what kind of Imperial Guard are these? Are they from one of the big famous kknds, an army of unnamed or unknown origin, or a new band created by you? If they’re Cadians, will the destruction of their world and possible extinction (or absorbation into other planets’ cultures) over the following century play into their story at all?

From Dan Griliopoulos, our writer: "They’re a mix of local forces and the survivors of a reinforcement force sent to remove the Orks. They’re no-one in particular."

What’s your process for hiring Voice Actors? Is it open? Do you generally stick with known quantity?

We outsourced the whole process. I'm not personally sure of the details, but they've worked with GW-approved voice actors before so I believe they sticked to those.

Sorry I can't answer in more detail.

What programming languages is the game written in?

C++.

XML for configuration.

Some Python, Bash, Awk for tools and automation.

Did you choose 40K over WHfantasy for any particular reason, or was it more of a "we know sci-fi and 40K is very popular right now" situation? Does GW treat the two licenses differently?

Fun-fact time! We wanted to do Warhammer Fantasy first just so we go away from sci-fi and personally do a different genre, but eventually changed to 40K after more objectively reconsidering. So glad we did. It was a popularity and coolness choice. Sci-fi (or science fantasy), honestly, also really is more our thing, even if we want to get away from it sometimes. Also better business choice, I think.

I don't know that GW treats the two licenses different per-se.

I'm a voice actor and my question is, any chance I can audition for a role? ;)

I'm sorry, I believe all the positions for that have been filled. :\

Certain other licensed games/works have allowed for alliances of convenience within the 40K setting, and we've already established that the Space Marines & Guard are technically on the same side. You've talked about the combat and the economy, but do you plan to address the other traditional pillars of games like these? Diplomacy, Technology... whatever "Culture" would look like in this setting? etc... I appreciate in the grimdark there is only war, but I would be concerned that "only war" would struggle in something like Civ, never-mind this game.

Technology is fully-featured, each faction containing 60 unique technologies.

There is a resource called "influence" that is largely used differently for each faction. Space Marines use it for Battle Barge operations and Chapter Tactics, Astra Militarum use it for City Edicts, Necrons use it for self-repair, teleportation and rushing production while Orks just want more so they become stronger. You could see that as a spin on culture, but really, in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.

Hey developers cant wait for the game looks fantasy couple of questions

1.do the factions share a tech tree or are they unique for each one?

2.is there alout of variety in terms of biomes and wildlife?

3.how many tech levels are there?

5.is there a skirmish mode or custom single player mode?

thanks for the answers

Hey grimdawn, thanks!

1. Unique tree for each faction.

2. Quite a bit, 6 different biomes, each with different properties. 6 entirely different "neutral wildlife" units each with their own unique powers. Plus a plethora of capturable "relics of war".

3. 60 different techs for each faction. They're in a tiered system, 10 tiers of 6 techs each.

4. Yes.

Space stuff? Stuff like orbiting ships bombarding the planet (sort of like how Beyond Earth did this with satellites) or something like that.

Also how do you plan on balancing Necrons who are arguably the most powerful faction of the entire universe? Less units/more costs I'm thinking?

Orbiting Battle Barge is one of Space Marines's unique aspects.

The baseline for balance were the codices from the 7th edition Warhammer 40,000. We've derived a ton from there, using our own conversion systems, so you'll be able to identify very familiarly if you've played the 7th edition of the board game -- things like Rapid Fire, Blast, Monstrous Creatures, and of course the relative comparison between the units.

Necrons in the abstract, balance out by being more expensive and having restricted city placement. Although if you compare individual units, you'll also note that a Tactical Space Marine is more expensive and stronger than a Warrior (the base units for the corresponding factions in Gladius).