If you want to start with Total War: Warhammer or persuade a friend to play, you can quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer number of playable factions. MeinMMO helps with the selection.
Total War: Warhammer is one of the best games if you want to start with Warhammer. It not only provides a good overall view of the world but also insights into the individual factions and their peculiarities.
By now, the game has 24 factions with over 100 commanders, which differ significantly from each other – at least in the large “Immortal Empires” campaign, which, for many players, is the heart of the game.
Among the factions on this list, only Cathay is included in Warhammer 3; for all others, you need to own one of the other base games or an additional DLC. You can find a description of all factions, whom they are suitable for, and which DLCs you need for them in our overview.
The game does suggest some factions that are suitable for beginners, but in practice, that’s not always the case.
Certain faction mechanics or new NPCs that enter the game can make it quite difficult for inexperienced players to find their footing. Here, we help you with our selection.
The MeinMMO team has collectively played several thousand hours and all factions. Accordingly, the list is based on experience and is unordered, so it is not a ranking.
By the way: If you want to play Immortal Empires but do not own Total War: Warhammer 3, you can still play the large campaign. The only requirement is that you have bought one of the Warhammer titles.
Dwarfs (with one exception)
Dwarfs are the faction if you want to learn Total War: Warhammer. They forgive mistakes much more than other factions, and their faction mechanic is easy to understand: you do what the book says and recruit units or craft items in the forge.
Here, we mean the Dwarfs, not their chaotic cousins, the “Chaos Dwarfs,” who have entirely different mechanics.
Depending on preference, dwarfs offer different play styles with combat-ready troops for strong expansion or a new feature that allows you to create thick mountain fortresses in a small area that hardly anyone can conquer.
Almost all of their commanders have starting positions where they will hardly have problems with other factions since hardly anyone has armor-piercing units early on. Only Grombrindal (The Ancestor Lord) has two very strong opponents right at his doorstep: Malekith and Valkia, and he is more challenging to play than the other dwarfs.
Dwarfs are the ideal faction if you prefer simple strategies and don’t want to spend much “micromanagement” in real-time battles. Typically, dwarfs fight in relatively fixed battle lines. They also have a very exciting lore: In Warhammer, there are 3 types of dwarfs, and two of them do forbidden things
