Campaign

The campaign in Total War: Warhammer 40,000 operates at a galactic scale and is structured as a hybrid between a traditional turn-based campaign and a meta-progression layer that ties multiple campaigns together. Players expand their control region by region on individual planets while fleets move between worlds through zones of concentrated conflict called Crusade Theatres. The campaign was discussed in detail during the Show and Tell livestream on 30 April 2026 and the earlier developer roundtable, with further detail at the June 2026 PC Gaming Show.

The Galactic Map

The galaxy view functions as a hybrid between a campaign selection menu and a meta-progression overview. Players do not move armies directly across the entire galaxy on a single turn timeline. Instead, the galaxy view offers several campaigns to take part in, each set within a defined region of contested space. Completing campaigns produces lasting changes that influence which campaigns and battles become available next, and how powerful or prepared the player's faction will be when entering the next theatre. Campaign screenshots of the star-system view label individual worlds by name, among them Fortis Ferra, Larstile Tertius, Larstile Quartus, Larstile Quintus and Drexus, each linked to its neighbours by star lanes.

Crusade Theatres

Each individual campaign takes place within a Crusade Theatre: an area of the galaxy seen as a hot point for conflict where multiple factions are fighting one another. Within a Crusade Theatre fleets move between planets along established star lanes, fight battles for individual worlds, and project power into adjacent systems. According to the framing in the developer roundtable, each completed campaign feeds into a higher layer that gradually shifts across the sector, and eventually across the galaxy as a whole, so individual victories carry weight beyond the campaign in which they were won.

Branching Campaign Paths

The June 2026 reveal confirmed that a campaign's story has branching paths. The choices the player makes and the territories they conquer steer which path the campaign follows, so a campaign is not a fixed sequence of battles. Creative Assembly also confirmed story-driven campaigns that teach the game's mechanics and the setting to newcomers, so players new to Total War or to Warhammer 40,000 have a guided way in.

Territory and Faction Bonuses

Controlling territory provides gameplay benefits that differ by faction. The reveal gave two confirmed examples: Orks can build Stompa war engines faster when they hold territory that yields Scrap, while the Astra Militarum gain a boost to tank production when they control a Plant on a civilised world. This ties each faction's economy and reinforcement strength to the kind of ground it captures.

Campaign Layers

Lead designer Simon Mann has described the campaign as operating on several nested layers. At the lowest layer the player fights real-time battles for individual regions on a planet. Capturing a region (for example a hive city) hands its resources and infrastructure to the player and creates a staging point for the next region. Capturing all the regions on a planet hands the planet itself, which in turn opens up access to the rest of that system. Star systems are connected by star lanes within a Crusade Theatre, and Crusade Theatres themselves are arranged across the galaxy view at the top level.

Fleets

Fleets serve several confirmed roles. They transport armies between planets, drop forces directly into battle from orbit, call in off-map bombardments both in the campaign and during real-time battles, and grant vision across the campaign map from wherever they are positioned. Bombardment from orbit is available to some factions rather than all of them, and a fleet can also be turned on the campaign map itself to strike enemy forces sitting in a region, at the cost of civilian casualties on the world below.

Fleets can be upgraded over the course of a campaign, with improvements to elements such as the bridge and the weaponry. Upgrades unlock stronger bombardment options and, further up, the setting's larger superweapons. Each faction handles fleets in its own idiom: Ork ships are described as looking like floating piles of rock with engines strapped on, while the Aeldari have fleets alongside other means of moving between worlds.

Fleet-versus-fleet combat is no longer described as absent. The development team has said that two fleets meeting one another produces an engagement, though it has not shown one or explained what form it takes.

Campaign Lengths and Modes

Three campaign formats have been confirmed. Full campaigns are the closest analogue to traditional Total War campaigns. Short campaigns offer a more contained experience. Single decisive battles let players engage only in the real-time battle layer without a campaign context. Single-player, online player-versus-player, and co-operative modes are all confirmed.

Planets and World Types

Each star system contains several planets that vary considerably in character. The development team has named hive worlds (densely populated industrial superplanets), agri worlds (vast agricultural producers), mining worlds and frontier worlds (sparsely settled outposts) as world types, and official campaign footage has additionally shown a civilised world. A fortress world type appears in some press summaries but has not been stated by the development team, so it should not be treated as confirmed. Each planet has its own type of civilisation regardless of its biome. The hive world shown in the Show and Tell livestream featured six mega cities visible at full 3D resolution from the planet view.

Planet Biomes

Four planet biomes have been confirmed. Each influences the visual character of battles fought on those worlds, and the development team has described a texture-paint system that lets the same underlying battle map shift its surface treatment to match a different biome.

Battle Maps

Battle maps within a planet vary by region rather than being identical reskins. The same underlying map can appear with different biome textures depending on which planet hosts it, and the same region can be fought across multiple orientations: north to south or east to west, and as either an attack or a defence battle. Confirmed map types include dense hive cities, hive outskirts, arid wastelands, and ice plains.

Two specific maps have been shown. The Upper Hive Plateau, from the Show and Tell, illustrates the dense-urban end of the spectrum with multi-storey buildings and anti-aircraft fire visible in the background. The Shattered Expressway, shown at the June 2026 PC Gaming Show, is a war-torn stretch of a polluted Imperial world on Armageddon, where the Astra Militarum and Orks battle was demonstrated.

Planetary Destruction

Exterminatus, the apocalyptic destruction of an entire planet, is confirmed as a campaign action. The development team has characterised it as a costly option rather than a routine tool: it permanently destroys the planet, with no way to undo it and no opportunity to rebuild, which sets it apart from razing a settlement in earlier games in the series. The capability is described as exceptionally rare and as requiring a long journey to acquire, so players are unlikely to be able to deploy it freely throughout a campaign. In the fiction the developers lean on, ordering the destruction of a world requires multiple layers of authorisation, and the Imperium would far rather spend a billion lives reclaiming a planet than lose it.

The Armageddon Theatre

Armageddon is the theatre the game opens with. The development team picked it as the setting's defining battleground between humanity and the Orks and as a way into the setting for new players, and has said it is the starting point rather than the limit of the campaign, with the stakes running between star systems from there.

Official campaign footage set in the Armageddon Theatre shows the structure in practice. The theatre holds several playable planetary systems, each containing multiple planets with their own biomes and tactical character. A planetary governor can issue a request for aid that becomes a mission, and holding a world carries economic weight: in the scenario shown, losing the city under attack would have cost the planet and the income attached to it. The Warhammer Skulls teaser in May 2026 named the Minerva System, in the Armageddon sub-sector, as the site of an Ork incursion.

A capital ship held in orbit above the contested region gives the player orbital options before and during the ground fight, including bombardment to soften a defending force ahead of a landing and a lance strike called down mid-battle. Reinforcements can be fed onto the field as a battle develops, and an army losing its position can fall back and form a new line deeper into the map rather than simply breaking.

The team has also described a planet-making system that assembles worlds from a civilisation type combined with a biome, so an icy mining world and an arid mining world are both possible, with battle maps matched to the visual character of the planet above them.

The theatre has a named antagonist beyond Ghazghkull. The Ork warboss Nazdreg Ug Urdgrub is confirmed to feature heavily in some of the early in-game narrative, in events tied to the fighting around Armageddon, and is described as a character the player will battle with and against. See the Orks page for what is known about him.

Creative Assembly has framed the opening not as a single campaign but as a series of connected campaigns that travel across multiple star systems toward Armageddon, where the story proper begins. Conquering a star system grants rewards that carry forward, and the studio has described a progression structure in which taking particular kinds of world unlocks access to specific units for the faction. Holding a world with heavy industry, for instance, opens up units the faction could not otherwise field.