Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000 Army Planner

The army planner is a battle checklist for Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000, not a points calculator and not an official Creative Assembly overlay. Unit stats, ammo counts, and a 2027 meta do not exist in public. What exists is a new engine built around guns and cover, four launch factions with custom warlords, Chaos later, and preview fights — Alpha Strike, Gamescom 2026, Eurogamer’s hands-on, Cody Bonds’ demo — that punish the same mistakes every time.

Tick the jobs in the widget, then read ranged combat so you know why each box is there. Pick a race with the faction picker if the faction dropdown is still a guess.

What every tick actually means

The planner is ordered like a fight, not like a codex.

• Read cover and sightlines before the first move. Hab-blocks and battlements are the map. A cavalry-charge opening from WARHAMMER III is how Cadians die in the street.
• Place infantry in ruins; keep tanks on firing lanes. Occupy geometry. Do not stand next to it. Armour strafes; it is not a mobile ruin.
• Set sentry mode on gunlines that should not chase. Sentry is the hold-position cousin pointed at guns. Without it, bait walks your line out of the building that kept it alive.
• Commit reserves only after the enemy commits. Preview battles reward the player who still has a card left when the WAAAGH! is already in the killzone.
• Strafe armour away from melee blobs. Tanks fire on the move with accuracy penalties in shown builds. Reverse and slide beat a heroic charge into Meganobz.
• Switch mixed weapons: frag versus infantry, krak versus tanks. One card is not one gun. Per-model targeting is a UI job you must look for; CA has not published a hotkey.
• Call bombardment or an army ability on clustered foes. Orbital tools exist. They are not the default click every fifteen seconds.
• Protect the warlord bodyguard; do not isolated-hero dive. Custom warlords at launch are not immortal legendary lords. Selecting the hero should not yank the bodyguard off a lane.

Unlimited simulated ammunition in shown builds is why “reload” is not a tick. PC keybinds and console controls explain that CA has not published exclusive letters or DualSense glyphs. Steam lists full controller support because this is the first mainline Total War on pad. Practise the orders anyway.

How the four races change the ticks

The checklist is shared. The emphasis is not.

Space Marines. Four small units was the Gamescom crash-site Strike Force. Every tick is louder because you cannot replace a squad from a 160-model pile. Orbit is your campaign home; in battle you are still a gunline that must take cover. Read the Space Marines start.

Astra Militarum. You are the gunline. Sentry, overlapping Leman Russ, Rogal Dorn, and Baneblade lanes, and not walking out of a ruin are the whole job. How to beat Orks is the mirror of this planner.

Orks. You still tick cover. The new engine will simulate every round that meets a mob that arrived as one clump. WAAAGH! is the commit, not the opening click. Industrialising planets in crusade theaters does not excuse a frontal blob on a river.

Aeldari. Least shown. The ticks still apply: do not stand in a street, do not chase, do not dive the warlord. Treat hit-and-run as a reason to use sentry and reserves, not a reason to skip them.

Chaos Space Marines are post-launch. Traitor Guard is a Guard reskin. Neither gets a secret row in this widget.

Use it as a drill, not as a 2027 build code

Watch an Alpha Strike or Gamescom fight with the planner open. Pause the VOD in your head at each timestamp and ask whether the player on screen occupied the ruin, left sentry on, and still had a reserve. Then run the same questions against your own imagined list from the builds hub.

Pair the drill with how to play so the galactic loop — planets, fleets, nested theaters toward Armageddon — does not surprise you when the battle ends. Wishlist and register on wishlist and beta. Sign-ups opened June 2026; play is later in 2026; the year around Gamescom is 2027; Steam is still TBA. Windows 10 64-bit is the published minimum OS and Windows 11 the recommendation; missing GPU numbers are not an excuse to skip sentry practice.

When the closed beta actually prints unit cards, this planner will gain numbers. Until then it stays a habit list for a gun-density Total War. Tick the boxes. Do not download a fake overlay that pretends the letters are official.