Gameplay showcase coming in August as well.

I personally really enjoy Gladius and have every piece of DLC for it. The only one I never use is Lord of Skulls. It was a pre-order bonus that adds a single unit that's fun to see one time and that's about it.

My recommendation is to try the base game. If you don't like the core gameplay mechanics, nothing in any of the DLC content is really going to change that. None of it fundamentally changes the way it is played.

My absolute favorite way to play is co-op against the AI. We like to take our team up against multiple AI teams comprised of random races. For that reason, even if you don't like a certain race's playstyle, it's still nice to own all the race DLCs. It adds a lot of variety in what you might encounter and makes for some interesting match-ups. They've now added basically all the major races... but if they start adding some of the really minor ones I'm very likely to still buy those as well.

The unit / reinforcement packs are all nice to have, but not essential. They are all essentially the same in that they add a single additional unit to each race. If you like the game, it's nice to add the variety, but each race still has ample units without them.

One nice thing about Gladius is it's not particularly long. It's relatively easy to finish up a game over the course of a couple sessions as player turns are simultaneous. If you give both yourself and the AI a little bit of a morale boost right from the get-go, you can ramp up the action a bit faster as well. For me, it's fun to see how different AI teams do together. Sometimes we also add a super powerful AI on its own "team" of 1 to see how it holds up.

Originally posted by Nasarog:

Originally posted by Vazilii:

Free is nice!

No extra fire power for the Tyrranids in the new DLC it seems. Guess they don't need it. Haven't played them yet, so don't know.

Yea, it's a shame.

Originally posted by aReclusiveMind:

I've picked up the Firepower DLC as well.

Tyranids received a new unit (Tyrannocyte) as part of the patch. I believe that's why they don't have a unit in the DLC.

It's useless and slow.

It very well may be. That wasn't the question I was answering.

I've picked up the Firepower DLC as well.

Tyranids received a new unit (Tyrannocyte) as part of the patch. I believe that's why they don't have a unit in the DLC.

Originally posted by Stars-N-Stripes:

Imaging my excitement when I saw the title and my mind saw it as RUSE 2 announced ... Never hear of REUS but looks interesting.

Ahh, sorry for the confusion. Yeah, Reus is a very different game. It is real-time though, so they both share that. :-)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1875060/Reus_2/

Abbey Games is back from the ashes with the announcement of a new version of Reus!

The first Reus was a bit of a flawed gem. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Abbey Games is doing with it now that they've had time to evaluate its flaws and rough edges. Their games always appeal to me as they aren't afraid to explore unique gameplay mechanisms and inject their own style into it.

Defeated my first campaign and ascended.

I enjoyed the playthrough, but I was happy when it was over. I won via the expansion victory condition and it was rather anticlimactic. After you light the beacons, you essentially just keep pressing end turn until you win. There were invasion forces spawned every 3 or 4 turns to fight off (around 4 battles total over the 15 turns) but they were small enough for my forces to defeat via auto-combat with no losses. It felt like busy work and is one of the reasons I don't enjoy arbitrary turn time requirements like that in 4X games.

I'm still excited to start another playthrough, but I don't think I'll go for that victory condition again. I probably won't go for the magic one either, as I believe it's similar in a lot of ways. Hopefully some of the realm conditions offer interesting alternatives as we've previously discussed here.

Originally posted by Nasarog:

Why are the races (except for the cats) so damned ugly?!?!?!

My goblin emperor takes great offense to this.

Originally posted by Nasarog:

There is only one thing I don't get... Horses. Shouldn't a large cat-folk ride a large cat vs. a horse? Just sayin'

Should a human also ride a large human in that case? Wait, don't answer that.

Of course, if we still had Andre the Giant with us, he could do it. Princess Bride is proof of that.

I managed to play for a couple of hours with no issues or crashes. Performance was great on a 3080TI at 3840x1600 ultrawide at max settings. I updated my video drivers before playing as a precaution, but aside from that I didn't have to do anything special.

Really enjoying the early game so far.