Golden Tooltips

Warhammer 40,000 – Gladius: Relics of War is one of the most interesting 40K strategy games available. Unfortunately, its interface suffers from a significant lack of information, making it harder for players to properly understand its mechanics.

Golden Tooltips aims to improve the player experience by:

• Reformulating Research descriptions.

All technologies now have their costs, effects, and cooldowns listed. You no longer have to wonder what the game means by “increases,” “improves,” or “reduces.” Due to modding limitations, I haven’t found a way to reveal weapon profiles on the research screen, but any information not covered in the tooltips may be found on the Compendium [F1] window.

• Clarifying the bonuses of traits for units, abilities, and weapons.

All traits have their effects written in full. If a weapon has a special condition for causing extra damage, you will know exactly how and when it will trigger. If an attack slows the target, you will know by how much. If a skill cannot target certain types of units, these restrictions will be listed.

• Fixing typos and improving clarity.

All tooltips are polished as much as they can be without removing information. This mod does not change any of the quest lines, however. It also does not change British English into American English.

No gameplay changes are in effect. Only tooltip descriptions are altered. This mod covers all factions, base and DLC.

Special thanks to Jack Lindsey for reviewing the mod and improving the writing.

CHANGELOG: Link[docs.google.com]

This mod is now available in the following languages:
– English (this version, by me)
– Spanish (by user Palillo).
It will not change the description for other language options. If you would like to have the contents of this mod available in other languages, you are free to use my modifications as a source to be translated for your own respective mods.

Golden Tooltips is compatible with any mod that does not add, remove, or change the original research, traits, weapons, buildings, terrain features, items, or faction abilities. As such, it works with any cosmetic or flavor mod, such as Gladius+ and Too Many Voices. The mod loading order does not matter. It may conflict with any mods that alter gameplay, either by presenting no tooltips for the added features, or by simply not changing the original tooltips entirely.

This mod has been tested and reviewed multiple times, but bugs may occur. If you encounter any typos, missing information, or crashes when loading a tooltip, leave a comment on the mod’s discussions for me to fix it.

Golden Tooltips does not work with game variables; all numbers are hardcoded into the text. This means that if a game update changes any of the values, I need to update the mod manually. While changes of this nature are unlikely at this point, I will try and keep an eye out for them.

This mod took a considerable amount of effort to conclude, and required the neglect of family and personal time both. I hope it brings you joy.

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After Golden Tooltips, I began working on an overhaul of the game that attempts to balance many of the inconsistencies or complications of the faction design, bringing features associated with both the lore and 9th and 10th editions of tabletop to Gladius.

Golden Gladius will aim to give every unit a specific role in a relatively rock, paper, & scissors capacity. Artillery units will be fragile, yet very efficient at injuring or pinning infantry; monsters and vehicles will be focused on either single-entity damage, utility, or horde elimination; heroes will be focused on their respective roles and be entirely optional to your particular playstyle.

Some factions will be completely revamped, while others will only be tweaked. Rather than weaken those currently considered meta, the mod will try to elevate all others to the same tier and balance them across all stages of the game.

To the extent that it proves possible, I will also try to add new units, abilities, and features to the game. If you have actual experience modding Gladius or other games, and you believe you’d know how to do that and would like to support the development of Golden Gladius in any way, feel free to reach out.

Given Golden Tooltips took me roughly 5 months of development working every day of the week with my limited time available, I expect an ambitious alteration of the game, like Golden Gladius aims to achieve, will take considerably longer.