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have you looked into this plugin: https://plugins.gradle.org/plugin/io.github.dexpatcher.patch-library ? Seems aimed at your exact use case.

OK if I understand this right (I can't find much documentation or use examples fro this DexPatcher), this modified dex files or creates its own or something like that? I was hoping a simple solution exists to my problem, like adding my class under dependencies and moving it on top of the libGDX library or something of that kind. Are you saying my problem can't be resolved with just Gradle scripting in some more elegant way than using a 3rd part library that modifies android packages at source level?

even if it happened to work for you in Eclipse, I don't think the order within a single classloader was ever meant to be specified (you don't have control over the specific order of JARs)

Very well, so what are my options?

Produce a patched version of the target artifact or use runtime byte code generation (e.g. - with Byte Buddy) to alter the affected classes dynamically. Or you could use a more conventional approach, replacing or supplementing the functionality of the target classes with code in your application.

since libgdx builds with Gradle, it should be doable to

includeBuild

attach it into your project and patch it locally