Warhammer 40,000: Warpforge – Factions Explained

Explanation of the Factions

• Space Marines reward “perfect” play with value engines that trigger upon you hitting 0 energy (mana).
• Orks play many weak units supported by bigger AoE-touting fellows. Their units tend to be cheap, but have downsides (e.g. their infantry are really weak and take up board space, and their vehicles tend to hurt allies on death).
• Eldar have weak units very potent on the offensive, and an extra resource fueled by their weak units’ deaths which strengthens their deck.
• Necrons have expensive units which can come back from death, are generally tanky, and regenerate a lot of health.
• Chaos builds Doomguy on their board by stacking five hundred buffs over time until you have to break through a unit which regenerates 20 health/turn and instakills anybody that attacks him.
• Tyranids have units which can rapidly snowball out of control (i.e. unlike Orks, their swarm units don’t worry about board space as they can merge to combine statblocks, so they can play a weak unit and then turn it into a raid boss on the next turn to suddenly end the game), and ‘lynchpin’ units which copy all buffs targeting them onto adjacent cards for good value.

There’s a bunch of ‘smaller’ differences (e.g. Eldar have more Flank, which lets them play a unit that attacks another unit immediately), but this is my experience with the faction playstyles so far.

Given how tanky the commanders are, the game as a whole leans towards a control-oriented playstyle where your board beats up their board until your big guns come out and you achieve critical mass, then you bully them out of existence.