A great thing about Gladius is that consecutive games can be very different. After my Marine playthroughs, I bought the Tyranid DLC, and started a couple of games with them included. The first time around, I got into a proper fight with the Nids - until the Necrons, having first wiped out the Orks, steamrollered us both. Next time, the Tyranids were destroyed almost immediately, and as I was beating up on the Necrons, a massive Ork horde crashed into us and totally derailed everything. But the one thing that seems to be constant throughout is that the AI Imperial Guard gets wiped out.
To make a long story short, the Imperial Guard challenge is to survive your enemies' attacks until you can go all Steel Legion on them (although Chimeras are nowhere to be found!). This is made somewhat challenging by the basic infantry squads only having flashlights and being generally quite useless. The native wildlife is a real challenge, especially the Enslavers, not to mention any AI factions. Marines and Necrons are particularly bad news.
The key units in the early game are the Tank Commander and your Heavy Weapons Teams. Even with the nerf to heroes' damage resistance, the Tank Commander can really take a beating, and dish out some damage to enemy vehicles as well. Once your heavy weapon teams start levelling up and get a Lord Commissar to supervise them, they will fuck up anything in the game - but they need to be protected. It's a fun exercise to build cities that provide firing lanes for heavy weapon teams while keeping them screened.
As you move up the tech tree, more options become available. The Guard are the only faction in Gladius with any real artillery, in the form of the Basilisk. I really like artillery, and to be honest I was hoping the Basilisk would have been more effective; its damage output isn't brilliant. Where it excels is range and mobility: with a range of six hexes (I think? The wiki is wrong) and a movement of four, a battery of Basilisks can switch targets with ease. They also make besieging cities very economical; just rain shells down on the enemy city while your tanks wait outside the range of their defenses to beat up any counter-attacks.
Speaking of tanks, if you can stick around for long enough, the real fun starts when you get Baneblades. They will simply roll over everything while soaking up absolutely ridiculous amounts of fire. And unlike Dawn of War, you can have as many of them as you can afford. Which is amazing.
To get that far, though, there's one key thing you have to consider as an Imperial Guard player: cities. While the Marines are limited to one city, the Guard can found as many as they like. Each city inflicts a penalty to loyalty, which can really cripple your production; but on the other hand, cities automatically pool their resources. In the early game, you need food to support your infantry units; later you'll need ore to build your vehicles. If your starting location is, say, on some grasslands, founding a second city in an ore-rich area is a very solid move. The special resource bonuses are definitely worth grabbing; I don't think a city should be founded without two special resource hexes in its (potential) radius except for extraordinary reasons.
If you can weather the storm and make the Manufactorum go brr, victory through overwhelming firepower is yours.
Of course, the AI Guard doesn't always get wiped out. If they make it further into the game, it turns out they like to build flyers.
And I mean a lot of flyers. These huge flyer swarms are actually surprisingly difficult to deal with, and if I'm honest, they're one of my few real criticisms of Gladius: they are just silly as hell.
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After succeeding with the Guard, it was time for Necrons. Chaos Androids with a vaguely Space Egyptian theme, I thought the Necrons were a slightly silly addition to the 40k universe when they showed up back in 3rd edition. Innovation is anathema to Warhammer 40,000 anyway, and it felt like they were being shoehorned into the fluff way too hard. However, they've been around long enough that I've kinda gotten used to them, and frankly I ignore most of GW's fluff innovations anyway.
As it happens, Gladius is a really good way to get to know the Necrons a little bit. They play a lot like Marines, with very durable basic infantry and limited cities: Necrons can found as many cities as they like, but only on spaces with a Necron tomb. It makes the decision-making process a lot easier! Necrons also regenerate, which can be immensely frustrating when fighting them, and their higher-tier vehicles, especially the Obelisk, can take massive amounts of damage. One important thing in Gladius is that you need tough units that can absorb enemy fire; the Necrons definitely have them - and they regenerate.
Playing as Necrons is actually quite good fun, and somewhat forgiving on the lowest difficulty level, which makes them a good faction to learn about the game with. Their faction quest is all right; while it's a little boring that it mostly involves fighting other Necrons, it does help to get properly acquainted with the units when you have to use them and fight them. If you can beat up your fellow Necrons, you'll gain victory and a strange compulsion to buy a Triarch Stalker model.
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So, to sum up, Gladius remains one of my favorite 4X games of all time. What next? There's the Chaos DLC; I'm a little disappointed they apparently don't get any tanks, although there is a crab enemy, which might be fun. Or anime space communism! I'm hoping there are more expansions coming, by the way. Dawn of War had everything Gladius has now, as well as Eldar, Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle. I would love to see the Sororitas in Gladius! I will certainly pick up at least the Chaos DLC next time it's on sale.
I recommend the Tyranid DLC. It's a thrill to see Carnifexes and Biovores and Hive Tyrants and everything rampaging around, and uniquely even if the nids are wiped out, they'll leave their mark on the world as they reduce entire hexes to bare rock when they scarf up all the biomass - very cool. But above all, I recommend Gladius. It remains a criminally underappreciated game, given that I think it's pretty clearly one of the best Warhammer video game adaptations ever.
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