Where this mechanic stands
The publisher’s description of the game, read on its official store listing on 4 September 2026, names four kinds of unit a player recruits: powerful veterans, elite combat squads, towering walkers, and immense war machines. It calls the whole a deadly arsenal of faction-specific units. Four nouns is the entire published statement about how a roster in this game is organised, and no unit announced so far has been placed into any of the four by the publisher. This page exists because thirteen unit pages on this site were written without it — nothing in the material anyone had read pointed at a taxonomy, and nobody thought to look for one.
What the tabletop establishes
Both games this one descends from organise their rosters, and they do it differently from each other. Total War sorts by battlefield role — melee infantry, missile infantry, cavalry, monsters, artillery — and the entire battle system is built on that vocabulary: a charge bonus assumes cavalry, bracing assumes infantry, a monster is priced by what it survives. The tabletop sorts by a different axis again, into HQ, troops, elites, fast attack and heavy support, which is about how many of each an army may contain rather than what they do. Neither of those is what the four published words describe.
The publisher’s description of the game names four kinds of unit to recruit — powerful veterans, elite combat squads, towering walkers, and immense war machines — and calls the whole a deadly arsenal of faction-specific units. It is the only statement about the shape of a roster that exists anywhere, and it is four nouns long. On the tabletop, an army list is organised by battlefield role: HQ, troops, elites, fast attack, heavy support. The four published words do not map onto that, and they do not map onto Total War’s own roster vocabulary either.
Tabletop identity, as established by Games Workshop. It says nothing about the video game.What has actually been shown
It is worth reading the four as a sequence rather than a set, because they appear to ascend. Powerful veterans and elite combat squads are both infantry and are distinguished from each other by something unstated. Towering walkers and immense war machines are both vehicles and are likewise distinguished by something unstated — and the adjectives, towering and immense, are the only thing separating them. A ladder of four rungs where two pairs differ by adjective alone is either a rarity scale or marketing rhythm, and the sentence does not say which.
What to watch next
The open question is whether these categories carry rules, and it decides how an army is built in this game. If they are a recruitment ladder — a cap on how many war machines an army may field, an upkeep that scales with the rung, a rarity that has to be unlocked — then army composition becomes a campaign-long constraint, which is much closer to how an army list works on the tabletop than to how a Total War stack works. If they are descriptive, then the roster is an ordinary Total War roster wearing 40,000 vocabulary, and the interesting question moves elsewhere. There is a third possibility worth naming: that the four words are copywriting and correspond to nothing in the game at all. Nothing published rules it out, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Information correct as of 4 September 2026.
What is not known
These questions have no published answer as of 4 September 2026. They are listed because an absence of information is information — and because we would rather name the gap than fill it.