Creative Assembly have taken us a little deeper into the biomechanical contours of Total War: Warhammer 40,000’s faction design, with a new development roundtable video featuring principal creative director Ian Roxburgh, lead designer Simon Mann and product owner for battles David Petry.

The short version: the starting faction balance is a question of both asymmetry and calculated familiarity. The Imperial Guard are for Total War traditionalists, with a straightforward emphasis on production and attrition. The Orks are comparably numerous, but they need to keep fighting or they’ll turn on each other, and have some unique capabilities based on repourposed tech. The Space Marines are all about precise usage of very small numbers of fanatical killing machines, with less capacity to build up an economy. And the Eldar are stealthy glass cannons operating out of remote Craftworld bases, who spend a lot of time trying to avert galactic calamities rather than just wrecking the other species.

None of this will especially surprise a 40K enthusiast, I think, but it feels like a sturdy selection of playstyles, with other factions (including Chaos Space Marines) to follow presumably via either DLC or in the form of a sequel. The devs also spoke about the game’s overall campaign view/battlemap interplay, which is split across planets and hinges on reinforcement mechanics.

Here’s the key line from Mann about dem Spesh Meringues. “There’s not lots of them, so when you’re playing as them, you’re not fielding tens of thousands of troops, you’re fielding maybe a hundred, two hundred troops, but each one of those is worth a hundred of the enemies.” He added later: “You’ve got to make sure you’re measuring your losses, because you’re not building infrastructure, right? You’re not able to build new constructions in the same way as the other factions.”

The Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum (delete as per your hatred of Games Workshop’s current naming conventions) are the Total Warriest of the quartet, according to Mann. “There are lots of them, they are massed forces, regiments, there is artillery, there is front lines. It’s something you’d see as a very military faction, even down to their industrial complex, where they’re building industry on planets and developing them in order to fuel the machine and fund the development of more tanks and infantry.”

The Orks, meanwhile, are “a massed green tide of chaos and energy that’s charging across the battlefield, armed with metal sticks and axes and whatever they can jerry-rig together, rocket launchers on sticks! But also vehicles that they’ve repurposed from imperial scrap.” Petry interjected that “there are some parallels with the Astra Militarum, in that there are loads of them, they are building up resources, but they are are much more about building up momentum, and continuing to fight. It’s krumping with the lads, you know, it’s continuing to fight, and continuing to push forward a frontline, and making sure the boys don’t get bored and start fighting each other.” So yes, Ork waaagh mechanics are in.

Finally, there are the Aeldari/Eldar (delete as per etc etc etc). “They play totally differently to anything we’ve ever done in the past, I don’t think we’ve ever done anything quite like this,” Mann said. “They aren’t a faction that is built for massed combat. It’s not big armies fighting one another. Every loss for the Aeldari doesn’t get returned – their souls are getting taken away by the Chaos gods.”

Rather than forming frontlines, Eldar generals will use stealth, Webway gates and other exotic technologies to achieve objectives that go beyond conquest. “Your goals may actually be just, don’t allow this awful thing to happen,” Mann said. “Stop this calamity that could be occurring to the galaxy. Everyone else is still trying to kill you while you’re trying to do that, but you know what your mission is, and what you need to achieve, and you approach it with kind of grim determination.”

The Eldar have access to a Craftworld, which serves as “a kind of off-map setup piece, which is actually where you’re recruiting all your units,” Mann added. They’ll set up shrines to get access to more elite units. They’re a bit like the Space Marines, conceptually, but they are all “glass cannons”. So far, so Space Elf. “Every soul lost is a soul not returned, so you have to really pick your fights,” Mann cautioned.

The campaign is organised around galactic hotspots called “crusade theatres” in which you’ll vie for possession of several planets. Planets are broken into regions. You’ll have fleets that can ferry troops between worlds, drop reinforcements and bombard the surface. There are also space anomalies to reckon with, but Creative Assembly have yet to reveal much about the Battlefleet Gothic aspect of TwartyK, assuming there’s any naval combat at all. Oh, and you can blow planets up, though Imperium players will need “multiple layers of authorisation” to do this. I imagine Orks are less picky.

Creative Assembly stress that reinforcements are a key mechanic in battles, partly because it strengthens the connection between these clashes and your wider strategy and fleet movements. Again, though, the feel varies by the faction. Space Marines are all about tactical insertions, able to call in drop pods that smash buildings on impact.

The Astra Militarum are more straightforward and attrition-based. “The Guard have less ways of interjecting directly into the battlefield,” Petry said. “They might have to throw wave after wave of their own men up the battlefield in order to arrive before the last unit that is probably now flagging, maybe running away – to replace them in time and hold that line.” The Ork are comparable, but also have teleporters, and the Aeldari can use their Webway gates for subtler battlefield choreography.

The devs appear comfortable with the relative prominence of shootybangs in the 40K universe, inasmuch as they still think there’s plenty of scope for old-fashioned Total War melee. “It is science fantasy,” said Petry. “So there is so much fantasy wrapped into it. And when you think about the conflicts that go on – yes, there is cover, yes, there is a lot of ranged combat going on, but there’s also loads of punching! So much punching! And loads and loads of krumping that goes on!

“You really have a lot of melee going on in these battles. Lots of forces will mass up and crash into one another. Practically every unit has some combination of a thing they can shoot you with and a thing that they can punch you with. In some cases literally – power fists, right?”

I think all this sounds promising enough, but again, unsurprising. I’m most sold on the Eldar, inasmuch as I’ve always wanted my own Craftworld, I’m keen on the prospect of having strategic objectives besides the obliteration of people with rounded ears, and I like factions that coax me away from my instinct to amass a shieldwall you can see from orbit. They also have such great hair.

There’s no way this would happen, given the popularity of Spice Maureens, but I’d have liked them to save the Imperium for a sequel or expansion, and taken a risk on an all-xeno line-up. This is partly because given Warhammer 40,000’s tricksy relationship with real-life fascism, I think it would be constructive to decentralise the weird theocratic humans. But also, Warhammer 40,000 games always start with Space Marines. Perhaps if the Space Marines showed up late to the party it would alter our understanding of them in an entertaining way?