Warhammer 40,000: Gladius Relics of War There Is No War Achievement Guide

The simplest, stress-free solution you can find for accomplishing the “There Is No War” achievement! If you can build a base and fend off neutrals then you have the skills to earn this rarity without breaking a sweat.

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius Relics of War There Is No War Achievement Guide

Disclaimer

Some of you may be asking “What’s the catch?” with this. The answer is simply time: it’ll be a long game, but there is nothing difficult about this strategy whatsoever. This guide should work with any version, but was tested specifically on vanilla v1.12.3 with no DLC or mods installed.

Quick Intro

This is my sort of achievement – play a game of Warhammer without any actual war. It’s quirky and deceptively simple at first glance with a really low rate of accomplishment that hints at the actual difficulty. I did check online for strategies to this, and came up fairly empty on both YouTube and Steam guides. There is one good Steam guide for this, but it uses a mod and highly recommends DLC. Since I got this when it was a free giveaway a few months ago, however, I didn’t want to drop money just to make one achievement easier. So I found my own way and, honestly, it wound up being way easier and simpler than expected. I used a lot of save games, which allowed me to go back and gather many details to make a comprehensive guide for an achievement that doesn’t really have one (at least for the vanilla version).

The Setup

I’ll start with the best part: this strategy has no time constraints. You can effectively take as long as you want, and you won’t encounter your enemy until you choose to defeat them.

We’re going to start with something that looks like this:

IMPORTANT: Do NOT change the loyalty bonus/penalty for your team once setting the difficulty; doing so will invalidate the achievement attempt.

You probably don’t have to pick the Orks, but I’m using them because Dakkajets travel fast, ignore rivers, and hit hard. Additionally, they’re basically 1940’s technology being used in the year 40,000 to great effect and that entertains me to no end. Honestly, you can probably use any late-game air unit and get a similar result.

As for the Necrons, every unit they produce will get thrown to the wolves (or any other neutral wildlife) and prevent them from ever amassing any real sort of army. As you’ll see throughout this guide, they never really improve on their starting position outside of slowing researching new tech.

These are the settings used for the advanced options, including some very key settings critical for this strategy. The others are chosen to be beneficial for attempting this with the Orks. The advanced settings to use are:

• Starting Resources: Medium
• Resource Costs: Medium
• Resource Upkeeps: Medium
• Research Costs: Medium
• Wildlife Density: Very High
• Artefact Density: Medium
• Special Resource Density: Medium
• Ruins of Vaul Density: Very Low
• Jokaero Trader Encampment Density: Very Low
• Necron Tomb Density: Very Low
• Webway Gate Density: Very Low
• Wire Weed Density: Very Low
• Orkoid Fungus Density: Very High
• Imperial Ruins Density: Very Low
• Forest Density: Very Low
• River Density: Very Low
• Region Size: Medium
• Region Density: Medium
• Arctic Region Density: None
• Desert Region Density: None
• Tropical Region Density: None
• Volcanic Region Density: None

What this does is provide a relatively wide open map with great visibility. The massive amount of wildlife leaves very little free space and allows them the ability to freely move around; helping their friends defeat those nasty Necrons who keep sending out units to die Zapp Brannigan style. The low amount of wire weed helps ensure that neutrals aren’t constantly killing themselves by walking onto it.

Finding A Map

This is your game and your achievement, so make sure you have a good setup. All is fair in love and war, after all. The first thing you want to do is save, and then immediately surrender the game. Choose the option to continue playing. This will reveal the map, showing you the location of your enemy and any potentially useful resources near you.

You want:

• the enemy to be on the opposite side of the map.
• to be located in a corner, limiting the directions you can be attacked from.
• enough space to build 3 cities in close quarters. (you will need to upgrade to increase your city size, keep this in mind!)
• access to an outpost for each city. (the bonuses aren’t critical though ideally they would be loyalty, energy, and/or influence)

If you don’t like the map, repeat the above steps until you find one that you feel is ideal and will make your life easiest. When going for this I just went with the first map I got and it worked out, so maybe luck isn’t that big of a factor here. Speaking of that map though, here’s what my starting position looked like:

This is what it looks like after surrendering. You can clearly see from the mini-map that getting attacked by the Necrons isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Early Game

The most important thing to note is that your biggest threat will be the wildlife. Drawing the attention of mobs of neutrals is not in your best interest for a couple reasons. The first is that they can easily overwhelm you, and the second is that outright killing a neutral unit will void the achievement. Your focus will be developing a city fast and sustainably. Your units should provide a deterrent to the neutrals and nothing more – you don’t want to lose any starting units. Keeping your Boyz together will help them survive, and allow you to retreat a unit with low health to heal. While you cannot kill a neutral unit, you can absolutely damage them. Personally, I was able to get Deffkoptas without losing any starting units, and then created a phalanx of those to defend my corner of the map. If you need more units, feel free to recruit some more Boyz.

IMPORTANT HINT: In order to prevent your units from accidentally killing anything, be sure they are NOT on overwatch. This is the shield with an eye icon when a unit is selected. Make sure it is not highlighted, and as annoying as it is you will have to disable it for every new unit produced. Your cities can also toggle overwatch, if you find neutrals daring enough to come after your cozy headquarters.

As for city building, high loyalty will reduce your build times so it is smart to focus on increasing this early, assuming you don’t have resource shortages elsewhere. In general try to keep each city at or above 5 loyalty, remembering that more is better and each additional city you build will decrease loyalty by 6 in ALL of your cities. Food shouldn’t be an issue if the supply is increased as your city grows. You may find yourself short on ore early as well, though this will likely be temporary as long as you are gaining it every turn. Keep on top of your population limits and your development should go fairly smoothly.

Researching is going to be fairly simple as our army will focus strictly on Deffkoptas and Dakkajets, so we can ignore anything infantry-related. It is important to constantly be researching. You want to focus on the tech that allows you to upgrade your city (additional population and resource boosts) and secondarily everything related to Kult ov Speed as this is where we will be building Deffkoptas and Dakkajets for our ‘no war’ army. Here is what I researched for the first 5 tiers:

• Level 1 – Orkoid Fungus (improves food production, first rewards 50 food if quests are on)
• Level 1 – Kult ov Speed (allows you to build war, uh, peace, yeah peace, machines)
• Level 2 – Grotz Hutz (allows you to increase city population)
• Level 2 – Mek Bitz Yard (allows you to build Meks, who are needed to found new cities)
• Level 2 – Bodge Jobs (yes, time is our friend, but who wants to wait for units?)
• Level 3 – Fighting Pitz (increases city loyalty, you will need to build several of these)
• Level 3 – Deffkoptas (helicopters bound to ground-level movement, great for city defence)
• Level 4 – Slum Town (increases maximum city size)
• Level 4 – Scrap Shedz (will help increase your influence and population)
• Level 5 – Fear Da Orks! (increases influence gain from your attacks)
• Level 5 – Bigbomm (gives Deffkopters an anti-infantry attack)

Once you gain access to Deffkoptas, you will want to build several of these to set up a loose perimeter that has good movement and is reliably able to deter the many neutrals who will curiously approach your cities. Take careful note of your ore and influence, since Deffkoptas upkeep requires those resources.

At this point, it is also a good idea to save your game. This is not only wise to do every 50-ish turns in case something goes awry (the game only autosaves your last 5 turns), it will also allow you to surrender. This is recommended occasionally so you can go to the Details tab of the game summary and confirm you have killed 0 units.

If needed you can also take a peek at the progress your opponent has made; it likely won’t be much. We’re effectively relying on them to thin out the herd of neutrals to make our eventual journey to their base all the easier. Almost as much as we’re relying on the neutrals to keep the Necrons powerless to stop us.

Mid Game

A lot of this part will seem like more of the same. There is still no risk from the Necrons. You should comfortably be adding a second city if you haven’t by now, and continuing to expand for additional resources. The production switch will need to be made from Deffkoptas to Dakkajets once you can pay their upkeeps. Each Dakkajet we want to build has an upkeep of 3 energy and 3 influence, which means you will want to be building many Weirdboyz Poles and Powwa Gubbinz to support them. You can help alleviate this if your research is progressing smoothly – there are upgrades to both your energy and influence output in later tiers.

The key is to simply pay attention to not outpace your output. There is no need to start producing Dakkajets until you are well ahead on resources (in the +30-40/turn range, with the capability to continue expanding). In many of my screenshots, you’ll notice the struggle for energy in particular is real. This will depend, however, on your map and the resource bonuses you’re offered. It is again worth stressing the point that time is not your enemy here; you are working to produce a sustainable fleet of maxed-out Dakkajets.

To clarify the research progression used for this scenario, here are the researched items for tiers 6-10:

• Level 6 – Finking Rooms (increases your research gain)
• Level 6 – Grot Scavengerz (it doesn’t matter, we need a second tier 6 to unlock tier 7)
• Level 7 – Dakkajet (the bread and butter of this guide)
• Level 7 – Green Flood (more healing is always good)
• Level 7 – Extra Vehicle Armour (sturdier Dakkajets are always better)
• Level 8 – Dakkajet Supa Shoota (deadlier Dakkajets are the best Dakkajets)
• Level 8 – Trophy Poles (increases the loyalty of your cities)
• Level 8 – Kraklin Gubbinz (increases the energy output of your cities)
• Level 8 – Red Paint Job (makes deadly Dakkajets even more deadly)
• Level 9 – Flyboss (will finally make your Dakkajets as good as they can possibly be)
• Level 9 – Shanty City (if you need even larger cities)
• Level 10 – Big Shinies (increases the influence output of your cities)
• Level 10 – Hammer of Wrath (makes your Deffkoptas as deadly as they can be)

At this point, a particular timeline hasn’t really been addressed because it isn’t terribly important. For reference, however, the ‘Early Game’ section covered my first 100 or so turns, and this section covers the next 100. At turn 200 I still had no Dakkajets and was just about to found a third city. By turn 300 the achievement was mine. So, too, shall it be yours. Unless you need more time, in which case take some more time! There’s really no rush here.

For comparison, let’s see how the Necrons are managing on the same turn. Spoiler, I think we’re winning:

Late Game

Once you have an economy able to support a couple dozen (or more!) Dakkajets, it’s time to start cranking them out. If you don’t have a third city, now is a good time to expand. Remember to keep the loyalty above 5 to ensure it has solid production; if you need a third city it will be for Dakkajet production if nothing else. All of your cities should have a Kult ov Speed, and you should have amassed enough resources to queue up a decent number of jets in all of them without worrying too much about their upkeep costs. If you’re missing any Dakkajet upgrades, be sure to research them now so you don’t need to wait around for them to finish later.

Eventually, you will have a ridiculously powerful army consisting of many Deffkoptas and many more Dakkajets. The Necrons will eventually clear out enough neutrals to make room for a second base, so the first part of the attack will involve saving the game and surrending to assess the current situation. Check the summary to ensure you still have 0 units killed. Plan out the easiest route for your Dakkajets, and feel free to use the Deffkoptas to distract neutrals in order to create an easier path through the wildlife to the Necrons. Big thanks to the Necrons for clearing out all those neutrals to make it easier for us to destroy their bases!

Reload the game, and enusre every single unit in your squadron has disabled overwatch. Now go while you know what the current map layout is like! Keep your units as close together as possible; there is strength in numbers. Remember that Dakkajets can ignore ground movemenmt restrictions caused by terrain. Even if your Dakkajets have to take some damage, you should be able to get the vast majority through easily. Once engaged with an enemy, they regain their full movement for evasion on the next turn so you will be able to bypass potential threats. Remember that the condition for this achievement is to strictly not kill units – you can still attack them to the point where they are weak enough to retreat. This can be a very helpful tactic, though you will need to reload a save if you accidentally kill a unit in the process. Pick the shortest route, be patient, and you should be at the first base within single-digit turns. This is the toughest part of this strategy. Don’t be worried about the Necrons putting up a defence, you’re way ahead.

Once you get to the Necron base it should be fairly simple. Evade their units, swarm the base, and take it down as fast as possible. Any other bases will be close and relatively clear of neutrals, so it’s a simple rinse and repeat process for them. Being perfectly honest this blitz should be exactly that: fast and effective. Try to relish the moment; there aren’t many turns left in the game and it hasn’t exactly been an action-packed affair.

The particular fruit of your labours, however, is the brand new shiny achievement you will earn once the final Necron base falls.