Total War: Warhammer 40,000

[Evil Eye]

1 hour ago, DemonGSides said:

And I do believe there was a rumor we were supposed to get Kislev mini's/expansion for TOW before Cathay, but then Russia went and did the thing and sentiment around Russian Coded Things has gone really downhill.

Sounds about right, though ironic Cathay is still in considering China's, uh, interesting humanitarian track record (including recent rumblings of invading Taiwan). I guess having the Western world's manufacturing industry by the dangleberries will give you more leeway with people being willing to make tiny plastic men based on you. Funny, that!

[TheVoidDragon]

2 hours ago, ShibeKing said:

I hope Total War 40k gives us Dark Mech or some other lore faction without its own line of minis. Total War Warhammer 3 gave us Grand Cathay and that eventually led to us getting minis for Old World. I am hoping for something similar to happen.

 

 

This is one area I feel 40k is in some ways going to be quite a lot more restrictive than WHF was. WHF being basically all one planet with one time period meant they could theoretically draw content from everywhere, they could go back to publications from decades ago and bring back some niche obscure character last seen multiple editions ago or whatever. They can't really do that with 40k, as while there are plenty of iconic characters, the Great Rift and the advancement of the time period 40k is set to means there's a much bigger constraining factor to doing that. 

[Scribe]

15 minutes ago, Valkyrion said:

 

Who never fixed what bug? The game isn't out yet!

 

There are several issues with ranged units (guns, not indirect like bows) in the current Total War Warhammer game. They have tried a few things to address it, such as allowing the first few feet to be uhh not there, or at one point comically allowing you to just flat out shoot through allied units with zero penalty.

 

I'm hopeful that the new game engine improves things. We are looking at an alpha here after all.

[Marshal Rohr]

35 minutes ago, Valkyrion said:

 

Who never fixed what bug? The game isn't out yet!

The bug from their previous engine that is clearly still present in the “brand new engine” lol. People think Bethesda has had the worst fall off but if you go back and play Rome 1 or Medieval 2 and then Total Warhammer 3 you’ll be scratching your head how a twenty year old game with triangle sprites has better combats systems than a game built for the highest end PCs on the market. 

Edited December 12, 2025 by Marshal Rohr

[Scribe]

10 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

The bug from their previous engine that is clearly still present in the “brand new engine” lol.

 

Faith Brother!

[Doghouse]

I think it looks quite good, especially the customization and the campaign system. I may have to give it a bash.

[DemonGSides]

Some really cool info that someone on reddit broke down from a German article; 

https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/total-war-warhammer-40k-exklusiv-preview,3444750.html

 

What I saw was people saying that campaigns are going to feed into a bigger campaign layer (:cuss: yes I love macro strategy layers), and that those campaigns can be either randomly generated or narrative campaigns; want to fight a war for Armageddon? Possible, and the map will change over time by based on how your battles go.  And then campaigns and battles can inform each other; if you win a campaign as SM to help some IG, in your next campaign they will show up as reinforcements or something.

 

I'm liking a LOT of what that article talks about. Here's the reddit link if you want someone else's translation; https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/wDSRYFl8Zh

Edited December 12, 2025 by DemonGSides

[Son of Rawl]

1 hour ago, DemonGSides said:

Some really cool info that someone on reddit broke down from a German article; 

https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/total-war-warhammer-40k-exklusiv-preview,3444750.html

 

What I saw was people saying that campaigns are going to feed into a bigger campaign layer (:cuss: yes I love macro strategy layers), and that those campaigns can be either randomly generated or narrative campaigns; want to fight a war for Armageddon? Possible, and the map will change over time by based on how your battles go.  And then campaigns and battles can inform each other; if you win a campaign as SM to help some IG, in your next campaign they will show up as reinforcements or something.

 

I'm liking a LOT of what that article talks about. Here's the reddit link if you want someone else's translation; https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/wDSRYFl8Zh

I'm trying not to get hyped, but reading that is making it hard not too.

[Scribe]

The hype is real, embrace it!

[TheVoidDragon]

3 hours ago, DemonGSides said:

Some really cool info that someone on reddit broke down from a German article; 

https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/total-war-warhammer-40k-exklusiv-preview,3444750.html

 

What I saw was people saying that campaigns are going to feed into a bigger campaign layer (:cuss: yes I love macro strategy layers), and that those campaigns can be either randomly generated or narrative campaigns; want to fight a war for Armageddon? Possible, and the map will change over time by based on how your battles go.  And then campaigns and battles can inform each other; if you win a campaign as SM to help some IG, in your next campaign they will show up as reinforcements or something.

 

I'm liking a LOT of what that article talks about. Here's the reddit link if you want someone else's translation; https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/wDSRYFl8Zh

 

Campaign map sounds pretty interesting, good to see there's actually going to be the usual infrastructure building and army movement

[Joe]

 

Big ol' roundtable from the team today. Still chewing through it myself, but did spot Kasrkin art briefly. 

[Ayatollah_of_Rock_n_Rolla]

No mention of space battles, so I think that we can write that one off. Or any kind of fleet to fleet interaction.

I've expected Eldar and SM to be more asymmetrical on operational level, so it's nice to hear their plans in that regard, but I'm waiting to see how in practice this asymmetry is gonna look like besides not having planetary bases. Will they be getting anything from conquests or will it  be an AM exclusive mechanic? What will be their real capability to rebuild their forces during a campaign? 

The campaign system sounds promising.

Unfortunately, I don't think they had as much to say about the tactical level. The reinforcement system sounds very nebulous. 

Their comments about AM limited capability to bring in reinforcements made me wonder. Is AM player commanding guard regiments, i.e. here you have a mechanized force, here a normal regiment, here an air assault regiment, which you have to coordinate on the planet or are you freely building armies from a common roster? What about the map sizes, if AM is by default foot slogging everything under enemy artillery and aircraft?

Also, they mentioned drop pods and webways in army differences, but there was no mention of difference in mechanization level, so shall I assume there won't be?

Edited December 16, 2025 by Ayatollah_of_Rock_n_Rolla

[DemonGSides]

19 minutes ago, Ayatollah_of_Rock_n_Rolla said:

No mention of space battles, so I think that we can write that one off. Or any kind of fleet to fleet interaction.

I've expected Eldar and SM to be more asymmetrical on operational level, so it's nice to hear their plans in that regard, but I'm waiting to see how in practice this asymmetry is gonna look like besides not having planetary bases. Will they be getting anything from conquests or will it  be an AM exclusive mechanic? What will be their real capability to rebuild their forces during a campaign? 

The campaign system sounds promising.

Unfortunately, I don't think they had as much to say about the tactical level. The reinforcement system sounds very nebulous. 

Their comments about AM limited capability to bring in reinforcements made me wonder. Is AM player commanding guard regiments, i.e. here you have a mechanized force, here a normal regiment, here an air assault regiment, which you have to coordinate on the planet or are you freely building armies from a common roster? What about the map sizes, if AM is by default foot slogging everything under enemy artillery and aircraft?

Also, they mentioned drop pods and webways in army differences, but there was no mention of difference in mechanization level, so shall I assume there won't be?

 

Sounds like the Eldar will have the easiest job with rebuilding; as they mentioned in the video, the Eldar's forces exist on their craftworld which is not part of the campaign map.  So they basically have a whole 'province', for lack of a better TW term, that exists that can't be assaulted (As far as we know so far) and will always have a safe home base, essentially.  I'm just glad Craftworlds aren't just fancier versions of the Black Ark or Aislinn's new High Elf ships; that would feel a bit rinky dink.

 

They repeated ad nauseum about how much AM act like a traditional TW faction, so I would expect that to be true.

 

I wouldn't be so decisive on talking about anything, currently.  We've known about the game for less than a week and there was 0 new footage in this Marketing Video, so caution is understandable but this reads like minds have been made up which seems tough.

Edited December 16, 2025 by DemonGSides

[Subtleknife]

Not quite sure how you can have a game about conquest of planets and not have space battles. Heck, I would just settle for a Paradox HOI4 like ship battle system but in space. I hope they have something, otherwise that is very lazy imo.

[Deus_Ex_Machina]

On 1/2/2025 at 2:09 AM, Kallas said:

I really don't see how:

 

1) it should be Stellaris but 40k skinned - Stellaris is so zoomed out that most of the time the actual details of factions are mostly just numbers. The visual distinction between the factions kind of doesn't matter that much. And please don't misunderstand me: it's a fantastic game, but in terms of 40k, it would be so far zoomed out that it would hold little actual visually appreciable 40k-ness.

 

2) TW:40k would preclude something like a Stellaris-style game. They are actually pretty vastly different styles of games, much like DOW wouldn't prevent a TW:40k, because even though they're vaguely similar if you look at only a few keywords they're actually built very differently in almost every way that matters,

 

Thing is, GW has already shown us that they're absolutely willing to portray 40k in various scales: Chaos Gate Daemonhunters is more zoomed out than Space Marine/SM2, and Gladius is more zoomed out than CG:DH - TW:40k would be more zoomed out than Gladius (mostly), and a Stellaris:40k would be more zoomed out than that. There exists room for all of these to provide different experiences.

Isn´t Stellaris more about managing your economy and research than actual combat?

[DemonGSides]

39 minutes ago, Deus_Ex_Machina said:

Isn´t Stellaris more about managing your economy and research than actual combat?

 

Depends on what you mean by "actual combat".  You get to personally customize every ship in your empire to either a specific blue print or a bespoke ship depending on how much effort you want to expend.  Ship to ship combat is played out like it is in all Paradox games; without your direct intervention and done based on some arcane algorithm.

I don't think that part would feel very 40k; though Kallas seems to have had some prescience with his ideas as it does seem that the Galaxy Map will work sorta Stellaris-y as it includes warp lanes and more grander progression than just "Get better troop".

[Ayatollah_of_Rock_n_Rolla]

52 minutes ago, DemonGSides said:

 

Sounds like the Eldar will have the easiest job with rebuilding; as they mentioned in the video, the Eldar's forces exist on their craftworld which is not part of the campaign map.  So they basically have a whole 'province', for lack of a better TW term, that exists that can't be assaulted (As far as we know so far) and will always have a safe home base, essentially.  I'm just glad Craftworlds aren't just fancier versions of the Black Ark or Aislinn's new High Elf ships; that would feel a bit rinky dink.

 

They repeated ad nauseum about how much AM act like a traditional TW faction, so I would expect that to be true.

 

I wouldn't be so decisive on talking about anything, currently.  We've known about the game for less than a week and there was 0 new footage in this Marketing Video, so caution is understandable but this reads like minds have been made up which seems tough.

 

I feel quite confident talking about space battles. When was the last time they did fleet action? Attila 10 years ago? This interview was supposed to highlight new and most interesting things about the game. I don't believe that they forgot about something absent from their games for such a long time even though they discussed fleets and their role. 

 

I do agree with You about the AM. I don't know why I expected anything more sophisticated than what has been in the franchise so far. They also mentioned Eldar building their bases to get more elite units like normal TW faction, so it was a random brainfart from my side.

 

PS It's "ad nauseam". First declination. 

[Scribe]

46 minutes ago, Deus_Ex_Machina said:

Isn´t Stellaris more about managing your economy and research than actual combat?

 

Yeah, very much so.

[No Foes Remain]

I think I read somewhere that the BFG games still hold the card for Space Battles, how true that is I don't know but would make sense as to why they're not going to appear in TW40k.

[ThaneOfTas]

20 minutes ago, No Foes Remain said:

I think I read somewhere that the BFG games still hold the card for Space Battles, how true that is I don't know but would make sense as to why they're not going to appear in TW40k.

Kind of, my understanding is that the issue isn't so much that Tindalos has the rights to BFG (unless there's an exclusivity clause) Its that in order to use any ship to ship combat game play, CA would need to shell out to GW for the licence for Battle Fleet Gothic as well as the licence for 40k.

 

They ran into this same issue back in TW:WH2 with the Vampirates, only two of the ledgendary lords were pre-existing because if they used any more they would have had to buy the licencing rights to Dreadfleet.

[Son of Rawl]

Creative Assembly should get into politics, they are masters of saying a lot while meaning little.

 

The concept artwork revealed some interesting bits though.

 

Marine Gravis Captains with head options, maybe getting Agressors? Plus a possible reveal of a main character which I'm guessing will be the "Advisor". 

Eldar having Dire Avengers, and shrines with the Aspect sigil for the territory they claim. The campaign may revolve around stopping events rather than conquering territory, which sounds interesting if they can pull it off.

The Guard, weapon platforms plus having a traditional type of Total War campaign. 

Orks will also get a traditional type of campaign of conquering territory to fuel the WWAAGGHH!!

[Scribe]

Apparently some additional detail in this about game size.

 

TLDWatch: Its a Total War game, as we expected. 

 

 

 

Go to the 1:14 mark, (1 hour, 14 minute) and there are some typical tongue in cheek comments that clearly put the doubts some had to bed.

[DeadFingers]

5 minutes ago, Scribe said:

TLDWatch: Its a Total War game

[Silvereyes]

I haven't played much Total War, I think Shogun 2 is the only one I ever put any real time into. I know Warhammer III has a lot of DLC and still getting DLC 3 years after release. Do we think Total War 40K could see the same kind of post launch content? And, well, to be blunt, is it atall possible we could see T'au as a DLC faction at some point? Because that would be an instant buy for me.

[Scribe]

40 minutes ago, Silvereyes said:

I haven't played much Total War, I think Shogun 2 is the only one I ever put any real time into. I know Warhammer III has a lot of DLC and still getting DLC 3 years after release. Do we think Total War 40K could see the same kind of post launch content? And, well, to be blunt, is it atall possible we could see T'au as a DLC faction at some point? Because that would be an instant buy for me.

 

I absolutely believe that this game will get a decade of support, and Tau will be in.

 

It would take a total failure for this to not happen.