Total War: Warhammer 40,000 intentionally let an Ork horde crush me—so you'd learn a lesson about unit positioning

The setup: three 20-minute slices at Gamescom

Demo sessions at big gaming conferences are rarely kind to grand strategy games. Total War: Warhammer 40,000, developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega, is precisely the kind of game that suffers: it's built for long, contemplative sessions, not a 20-minute drop-in, pull-out, drop-in-again schedule.

That's exactly what I got at Gamescom: 20 minutes of the battle tutorial, 20 minutes of the campaign tutorial, and 20 minutes in a scenario where my Space Marine army faced an overwhelming Ork assault. I can't judge the final game from that — but I walked away desperate to play the full thing.

What the tutorials showed: guns change everything

Skipping past the basics, the tutorials confirmed what Total War fans expect: battles happen on large maps, and success depends on positioning units to exploit strengths and cover weaknesses. The big change is that unlike earlier entries in the series, almost every soldier in Total War: Warhammer 40,000 carries a gun, so ranged combat takes center stage. The maps even revive the cover system from Empire: Total War. Space Marines dug into cover on a hilltop will shred Ork Boyz charging uphill; reverse the positions and the Marines can be swamped.

Battle product owner David Petry put it this way: "A lot of RTS games are more focused on the matchup... We care a lot about matchup, it's really important. But positioning also really matters. Positioning is one of the most important things in Total War. It should almost trump match up."

How battles are prepared: fleets in orbit and howitzers miles away

The campaign slice I saw — building bases, moving armies, launching battles — felt very Total War, though I didn't see the interplanetary layer that distinguishes this game from its predecessors, nor the base building that supports battles.

What I did learn: beyond simply bolstering your army, you deploy off-map assets. An orbiting fleet can deliver bombardments — flesh-melting lasers and gunship strafing runs — while massive howitzers shell enemies from miles away. "Making sure that you've got a fleet with the right stuff on it, with the right people in the drop pods... [means] you can deploy the things that you need where you need them in order to win," Petry says.

Spoiler-style war story: how I lost the skirmish

The scenario: Orks are assaulting a defensive line held by the Astra Militarum, and I must reinforce three capture points with a small Space Marine force. I split my forces evenly across all three points — mistake number one. Each Ork unit numbers around 100 models; my Marines cluster in tens and twenties. The Orks concentrated on the western point while my eastern troops sat idle, and by the time I tried to shift forces west, I learned how slowly Space Marine infantry moves.

Compounding this, I barely knew what my units did beyond the Intercessors from the tutorial (bolt rifles, good against lightly-armoured infantry, poor against the heavily-armoured Orks bearing down on them). My tabletop Warhammer knowledge is 20 years stale; my frame of reference is the Dawn of War games, played much closer to the ground.

I did have Terminators in storage aboard an orbiting ship, and I called them down in drop pods right onto the heads of Ork Boyz harassing my line. Even with storm bolters and powerfists, dropped into the thick of the horde, they were quickly overwhelmed. Orbital lasers, strafing runs, howitzer blasts — none of it was enough. The battle was lost, and Space Marines are too proud to run.

Where the game stands now

To be fair, the demo format worked against the game — with hours of familiarisation, I'd have read the battlefield better. All-gun armies also make it harder to parse combat at a glance than traditional Total War's obvious melee/ranged/cavalry splits, though Petry noted each unit retains a "core function" regardless of specialisation.

That specialisation is significant: "Throughout your campaign, you're going to be able to upgrade your units and change their equipment in meaningful and punchy ways," Petry told me. Intercessors can swap bolt rifles for short-range autobolters or long-range stalker bolt rifles, and take different sergeants with different abilities — letting you "grow and adjust them as you go, and tune them towards different specialisations." The flip side: mix up your squads and your snipers might end up on the low ground while short-range troops sit too far back to cover them.

Currently the game is in its post-announcement, pre-release demo phase — no release date was given in my sessions, and the full campaign's interplanetary systems remain unseen. What the Gamescom build did establish is the core loop: positioning trumps matchup, preparation off the battlefield shapes victory on it, and every unit in your army is a long-term investment. I'll be watching closely for a longer look.