Welcome to part two of our look at why we choose some Warhammer 40,000 miniatures to be Warlords and others bodyguards. You can find part one here, where we discussed how Warlords can add new deck building strategies to the game, using the T’au and Tyranid Warlords as examples.
Battles

The Warlords added in the previous ‘Warlord Month’.
Aside from deck building, the other aspect we look at is whether each Warlord lets you try different tactics in battle, and / or gives you something new to think about when you’re facing off against them.
Returning to last week’s examples, when using the T’au Warlord Commander Farsight, you have to decide whether to make your final cards two melee hitters to make use of Farsight’s end-of-battle melee boost, or perhaps save a card with the Taunt trait, to distract the enemy while Farsight assassinates the enemy Warlord.
And with the Tyranid Warlords, decks built around Ghosar need to focus on exposing the enemy Warlord before you’re forced to deploy your own Warlord (as Ghosar hits hard, but isn’t super tough). Whereas, because the Hive Tyrant costs so many points, his (its?) decks need to hold the enemy up for as long as possible, so the Tyrant’s special rule has as many turns as you can manage to deliver bonus damage.
Choices
Hopefully this and last week’s post mean you can now see why we select character A over B to become a Warlord, and by extension, why characters who are perfectly capable of leading a Warhammer 40,000 army end up as bodyguards in our game. After all, just because a fan-favourite character doesn’t achieve what we need as a Warlord, that doesn’t mean we’re going to leave them out of the game.
Taking this a step further, if you’re wondering ‘why isn’t my favourite HQ choice in Combat Cards yet?’ or you see us include a raft of new Games Workshop miniature releases but their leader is suspiciously absent, it may be that we’re holding them back as a potential future Warlord.
Power
A final point – we do intend that over time we’ll add new Warlords who are simply more / less powerful versions of ones in the game. I’m not saying we’ll have ‘powered-up’ versions of existing Warlords, rather that factions may get a second Warlord who does what one of their others already does, but in a more or less powerful way. This can be helpful because it alters the bodyguards you can / can’t afford to take when building around a specific strategy.
For example, the Tyranid faction already has a melee hitter Warlord in Ghosar, but he’s quite fragile and so has a reasonably low points cost. At some point we intend to add the Swarmlord as a Tyranid Warlord, even though ‘he’ (it?) is melee focused, too. In this example the Swarmlord would be much more powerful and tough – and therefore more expensive to include in your deck. The same could apply to the Aeldari Avatar of Khaine (powerful, expensive) and a potential new melee focused Warlord, such as one of the Phoenix Lords (smaller, cheaper).
Conclusion
So to sum up, each Warlord has to give you new options when building your deck, or new tactics to try in battle – and ideally both of those things. If a new card is simply too close to an existing Warlord from the faction then they become a bodyguard, because we don’t want to leave all these cool characters out of the game.
I’ll run a post on each of the eight new Warlords when the next ‘Warlord month’ rolls around, but in the meantime keep an eye on our Facebook page, where we’ll show each new addition and detail their special rule.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions for new Warlords please comment below, on Facebook, or mail us at [email protected].
Thanks,
Stu
Great job on the update, lots of issues fixed, the feedback tickets i have submitted have been closed, should i re-submit? Is there another patch coming? Some of the issues are simple, like the objective countdown timer being off by 6 hours, others are a little more complex, like will the ready stat ever show on cards as a red or green arrow ever again? And some are bug issues, like canoness veridyan’s special crashing the game if you kill all 3 bodyguards in the same round of attacks. If the ticket was closed i would imagine some sort of resolution, not an on going issue…
Hi there, thanks for all the comments and feedback.
Re. balancing cards – this is something we’ll definitely be doing in the future, but we’re focusing on general issues / improvements / bug fixing first.
Re. your issue being closed – I can’t really comment on how the customer support team work, but feel free to get back in touch with them. We’re certainly aware of the Canoness Veridyan bug and are working to address it (and generally polish and tighten up all the Warlord special rules).
Also, IF the game ever gets back to pvp i’d look into nerfing Bro-Lt. Tolmeron’s special, when you have enough deck points to field a Hammer of Titan, Cassor the Damned, and/or both a brother Gorjan, or brother Crusaius, every ai team i match against cowers before the melee and boosted ranged of the 2 dreadnaughts, 100% psychic attack, most ai teams dont even have a psychic bodyguard and will just eat the titans attack with 0 damage output, just to avoid the melee and ranged. The only team close to being op like that is a distant tau or tyranid. Thanks!
Sometimes i accidently buy skull packs when trying to select them, alot of the time they take 2 or 3 taps to start the timer going and there is no confirmation for buying them still, you used to be able to check the %’s for rare and legendary by tapping the skulls and opening the confirmation window. That would be nice. It would also be amazing if campaign battles counted towards kill packs, 9 out of 10 times when i go to war, i fight high point warlords with 1 to 3 bodyguards. There are only 4 skull packs and it takes 3 to 4 battles every 8 hours to open a kill pack, unless you’re lucky enough to fight an orc.
It would also be amazing, if you guys expanded the campaign screen to include the 5 players closest to your score, like it used to be. You cant scroll that screen down to read them but i know they are there. I feel like a tiny fix like that would bring back that community feel this game has lost. Instead of just seeing the same guys every week in the top 5 spots, you could compete with people around the same game level/interest. And that would hold us over until the clans update.