The game
The eight faiths
Each faith fields its own units, researches its own magic and wants to win in its own way. The descriptions below are about how they play; for the numbers, every faith's units are catalogued individually.
OrderThe Disciplined
Knights and paladins who fight in tight, drilled formation. Order is the faith of law, oaths and heavy armour, and it plays as the most conventional of the eight — solid infantry, strong cavalry, and healing magic that keeps a line standing rather than breaking it.
Order's problem is speed. Its armies hit hard and hold ground, and they arrive late.
ChaosThe Unbound
Barbarians, berserkers and raiders who trade discipline for ferocity. Chaos units hit above their cost and die in proportion, which makes the faith an early aggressor that has to keep winning to stay ahead.
A Chaos war is a series of bets. Cautious play is the one style the faith is bad at.
LifeThe Verdant
Healers, rangers and the creatures of the wood. Life is the restorative faith: its magic mends and strengthens rather than destroying, and its armies win long fights by still being there at the end of them.
Life is the natural opposite of Death, and the campaign never lets you forget it.
DeathThe Unquiet
Necromancers and the risen dead. Death fields cheap, expendable troops backed by magic that drains the living, and it is the faith whose losses matter least — an attrition army in the most literal sense.
Balkoth, the antagonist of the campaign, is Death's lord. Playing Death is playing the villain's side of the story.
EarthThe Steadfast
Dwarves, stone and siege. Earth is the defensive faith: tough, slow, heavily armoured units, strong fortifications, and a talent for mining that turns a quiet corner of the map into an economy.
Earth rarely loses a fight it chose. It often loses the map while it was choosing.
AirThe Swift
Fliers, skirmishers and storm magic. Air trades armour for movement, reaching threatened ground first and refusing fights it does not want. Its units are fragile and almost impossible to pin down.
Air is the faith that most rewards knowing the map, and most punishes standing still.
FireThe Consuming
Burning creatures and offensive magic. Fire has the most direct damage in the game and the least interest in defending anything, which makes it lethal on the attack and brittle when someone attacks back.
Fire's answer to most strategic problems is to remove the thing posing it.
WaterThe Yielding
Sea creatures and shifting, adaptable magic. Water is the most flexible of the eight — fewer standout strengths than Fire or Order, and fewer holes, with spells that redirect a fight rather than win it outright.
Water is a generalist. Whether that is a strength depends entirely on the opponent.
Each faith's roster is listed on the units page, grouped by faith and with the stats read out of the game's own scripts.
Every faith can be led by a warrior, a thief or a mage, and that choice changes the opening far more than it changes the endgame. A faith described above as defensive is describing its units, not the only way it can be played.