I play on large maps on slightly faster than normal speed (normal speed with a few personal tweaks)
For Tyranids, termie spam early into Warriors/Raveners/Carnifex will destroy wildlife faster than SM can before Terminators/Centurions, but even then...
As nids I killed (hard) Astra before turn 40, though I don't think the AI can play Astra very well unless given time to get tanks out. Vanilla issue, though. I went double book -> crane -> 3x inf buildings & 3x monster buildings in 2 cities.
Nids felt like a proper devouring swarm, sacrificing the chaff to let the damage dealers eviscerate everything.
SM I couldn't get past 0.2% wildlife, though I feel nids would love that. Do the chaos gates/masters of possession create cultists and dark disciples? Otherwise I think my wildlife settings bugged for some reason

Yeah, some of the wildlife does reproduce, including the Doom Cultists/Disciples around the Gate of Fate.

As far as AI goes, there's a dissonance here for me since my features are geared a bit more toward adding depth and opportunities which - inevitably - the AI isn't capable of even perceiving, let alone utilizing. And thus my attempts to make the game more challenging, in some respects, do the exact opposite (MP notwithstanding). The Guard definitely gets especially shafted by this since the AI employs units individually, rather than cohesively, which throws overlapping lines of fire, combined arms, and defensive terrain out the window. Although I do find if they get Ratlings out early on then they can really do a number on non-swarm factions like Astartes or T'au.

Tyranid core units are quite amusing in this, since they do by rights have an absolutely devastating alpha strike and can massacre most (soft) early game units, but nonetheless seem to organically fit better as sacrificial chaff than a proper frontline. A lack of ranged option and the need to penetrate through overwatch nets makes that a necessity, Tyranids simply can't play timidly or defensively (notwithstanding platitudes about offensive being the best defense).

Do you feel the wildlife is not enough of an obstacle? They have been nerfed since I first released the Overhaul due to popular demand. Any particular thing you can point to that stymied your progress with SM? I've had a similar issue, but it does seem to me that some of the factions can't afford to spread out in all directions immediately and have to concentrate their forces on a single front to make gains until they can properly industrialize.

@Callipygian Apricot I've since realized that region size has a bearing on AI spawn "density" I guess, and I initially had region size at small. Changed it to medium when I was trying to get better map generation, and maybe finally realized/understood those settings more.
Personally I mostly prefer to turn off wilfelife completely, but I understand Gladius is balanced around it. I prefer engagements with the AI opponents and often find even after turn 100 the AI hasn't met anyone else and is still barely expanding due to wildlife. But that may be due to my lack of understanding the world gen options, as well as the AI's general lack of coordination and strategy.
That said, to add to the feedback: I find Tau overcharged weapons, whirlwind incendiary, castigator weapons e.t.c to be completely lacklustre in vanilla. I struggle to find even a single use-case for these weapons when they almost always do much less damage than standard modes/ammo. I'm not sure if you've changed these or not, but for vanilla at least I feel "large blast" trait is completely underpowered, perhaps nerfed into the ground by devs? Not sure, but it feels bad for the most part.
Also Tau feel really nice as a line-holding, overwatching heavy firepower faction. Aeldari are giving me a run for my money, though!

Originally posted by Catawrecks:

@Callipygian Apricot I've since realized that region size has a bearing on AI spawn "density" I guess, and I initially had region size at small. Changed it to medium when I was trying to get better map generation, and maybe finally realized/understood those settings more.
Personally I mostly prefer to turn off wilfelife completely, but I understand Gladius is balanced around it. I prefer engagements with the AI opponents and often find even after turn 100 the AI hasn't met anyone else and is still barely expanding due to wildlife. But that may be due to my lack of understanding the world gen options, as well as the AI's general lack of coordination and strategy.
That said, to add to the feedback: I find Tau overcharged weapons, whirlwind incendiary, castigator weapons e.t.c to be completely lacklustre in vanilla. I struggle to find even a single use-case for these weapons when they almost always do much less damage than standard modes/ammo. I'm not sure if you've changed these or not, but for vanilla at least I feel "large blast" trait is completely underpowered, perhaps nerfed into the ground by devs? Not sure, but it feels bad for the most part.
Also Tau feel really nice as a line-holding, overwatching heavy firepower faction. Aeldari are giving me a run for my money, though!

As a Tau player, I would tend to agree, especially with your point about Overcharged weapons. I think the Pathfinders are the only one worth using for that, and I think this mod actually does a really good job of making them slightly less of an early-game glass cannon.

Originally posted by Ender 42:

Originally posted by Catawrecks:

@Callipygian Apricot I've since realized that region size has a bearing on AI spawn "density" I guess, and I initially had region size at small. Changed it to medium when I was trying to get better map generation, and maybe finally realized/understood those settings more.
Personally I mostly prefer to turn off wilfelife completely, but I understand Gladius is balanced around it. I prefer engagements with the AI opponents and often find even after turn 100 the AI hasn't met anyone else and is still barely expanding due to wildlife. But that may be due to my lack of understanding the world gen options, as well as the AI's general lack of coordination and strategy.
That said, to add to the feedback: I find Tau overcharged weapons, whirlwind incendiary, castigator weapons e.t.c to be completely lacklustre in vanilla. I struggle to find even a single use-case for these weapons when they almost always do much less damage than standard modes/ammo. I'm not sure if you've changed these or not, but for vanilla at least I feel "large blast" trait is completely underpowered, perhaps nerfed into the ground by devs? Not sure, but it feels bad for the most part.
Also Tau feel really nice as a line-holding, overwatching heavy firepower faction. Aeldari are giving me a run for my money, though!

As a Tau player, I would tend to agree, especially with your point about Overcharged weapons. I think the Pathfinders are the only one worth using for that, and I think this mod actually does a really good job of making them slightly less of an early-game glass cannon.

I personally tweaked overcharged weapons in my own personal balance mod, just by adding 1 flat damage, and that appears to do the trick. Though it made Pathfinders massively overpowered. I think by default their overcharged weapons are fine, and indeed this mod does make them better to use as they don't die when a leaf falls. A unit I avoided before, but definitely find very useful and good to use now with this overhaul.

I'll need to deep-dive into overcharged weapons at some point, since currently any changes to them are derived from the fact I had to fundamentally rework all of the blast traits, rather than targeted balance changes. In vanilla those traits made units hit more models with the same attack, which creates very janky interactions with the Overhaul since some vehicles now have multiple models, which in my early testing made explosives hilariously OP against hard targets. At this point all blast traits hit every model in a unit, with the weaker variants having pitiable armour penetration and limitations on its max/min damage.

I can only assume this makes the overcharged weapons more specialized against large groups of enemies, ork & tyranid hordes especially, but haven't gone through a dedicated set of tests to compare overcharged/standard weapon performance. Still, it's good to hear they have their use-cases, although the extent of this remains unclear. I did specifically work on the krak/frag missiles of the Heavy Weapons Squads as the latter was completely redundant.

Funnily enough my concerns with Pathfinders and other sniper units is that I might've made them a tad overpowered. In my playtests with the Guard I often get ratlings as early as possible because of their lethality against heroes and smaller squads like Space Marines/Eldar, plus as outpost garrisons.

To be honest, the blast mechanics is in dire need of additional work right now.
Pure mechanical balancing of everything "blast" created pretty weird situations where e.g. basilisks absolutely destroy swarms, even better than before, yet can't do anything at all against single targets - yeah, they're supposed to be weak here, but not to the point of only being able to tickle things like heroes, no matter how soft or weak they are. Tickle damage could amount to something in vanilla if you throw enough of it, but not in overhaul - removing 200-ish HP by 3 HP per attack cannot be a thing at all.

On the other hand, Devil Dogs now functioning only as unimpressive antiswarms (because Melta Cannon is "blast" too, and got balanced to 0.2 damage per attack AND 2 armor pen) is just a big no.

This needs more rules to work properly: e.g. relaxing some blast-related gating specifically for blast meltas or removing their "blast" quality whatsoever (it should be ok without "blast" with 6 devil dogs per unit), making (small) adjustments in siutations where blast weapons attack low figure count units and single figure units, etc.

Attack amounts need to get an overall balance pass as well. E.g. Hydras are so hilariously OP with their 4x12 attacks that my knee-jerk reaction was to reduce them by 1/3 everything by leaving only 4 units in squad instead of 6. And even then I had to further tweak them to be more in line of cheap T3 unit that supposed to be mostly AA.
Edit: It seems that Hydras were heavily affected by "TwinLinked" trait shenanigans and ended up doing about twice-ish as much damage than they really should.

Another unrelated fun fact: Primaris Psyker has "Oomph" trait. It really shouldn't, it already gets attack increases from having "Hero".

So, I played around with numbers and did the following adjustments to prevent blast-related weapons to be way too gentle with single figures and small groups:

Step 1: add classification traits based strictly on number of figures in a unit.

Single - obvious (excluding Fortification, these are better left separate)
Few - 2 to 6
Several - 7 to 20-ish

Anything larger is fine as it is. SM and CM sub-20 units seem too tough without adjustments while AdMech 20 and 24 units are fine as they are, so I draw the line at about below 20.

Step 2: add extra damage multipliers on all the blast traits via extra conditions.

Blast (aka tier 1 of blasts): mul 1.0 vs Fortifications; mul 0.5 vs Single, mul 0.1 vs Few, and mul 0.03 vs Several.

Then next tiers of blasts (Large, Massive, ApocalypticBarrage, ApocBlast, ApocMegaBlast) get 0.2 more per tier vs Fortifications, 0.1 more per tier vs Single, 0.03 more per tier vs Few with cap of 0.22, and 0.01 more per tier vs Several with cap of 0.05 (any further increases seem way too harsh).

Also added mul 0.05 vs Single to Flamers (Template and HellstormTemplate). Primarily so flamers aren't utterly powerless vs heroes. They're still weak, but not in completely ignorable fashion.

---

Numbers are looking pretty fine in debug, I'm going to playtest them a bunch (this will probably take a lot of time).

Additional notes on vanilla items: Zoat Hide Jerkin, Uncreator Gauntlet, and Jokaero Digital Weapon should be overhaul'd with new scale for hitpoints for the former 2 and number of attacks for the latter.

After playing some games, I've come to conclusion that Blast changes from the mod are too heavy-handed and unnecessarily complicated.
Making all blasts to always hit whole units is not really needed that much. What's worse, it creates a whole fanout of smaller issues (melta cannon got rekt, artillery barely scratches single figures, etc).

Instead, I've tried to slightly rescale vanilla Blast traits (increasing additionalMembersHit a little & a little more for bigger blasts) while not changing their damage, and it was largely very okay. Blast weapons are still in a kinda volatile state, too many attacks or too much other bonuses easily turn them OP - but on the whole the game uses much less extra-specific rules and gating related to them.
Further balancing could be done with small-scale changes (like AP reduction for blasts instead of AP capping).

So far I've ended up with only global -1 AP modifier for blasts/flamers, reduced amount of blast attacks for specifically heroes (x18 here is just too much), and slightly nerfing a specific combination of Blast and DestroyerWeapon. Rest was fine.

More playtesting awaits...

Have you made your work public?

Sometimes units gets evaporated with the blink of an eye it's really.. weird

The mod is upping HP by 50% but units are more frail than ever, except big pieces like monolith

I may, someday.
The current plan is to playthrough each faction and review all the units.

It's likelty going to take tons of time, unfortunately.

Yeah for sure,

Too Bad I can't play the game with only infantry