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 repurposed 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.