One switch, two games
The Warhost and the Codex each have a Warhammer 40K / StarCraft TMG switch at the top. It’s one setting, so the Codex follows whichever game you were last building for. Each game keeps its own armies and its own open list: flip to StarCraft mid-way through a 40k list, come back, and the list is still open where you left it. The app starts on 40k, as it always has.
Building a StarCraft army
Pick a race and an Engagement Scale — Skirmish (1,000 Minerals), Standard (2,000) or Grand Offensive — or type an exact Mineral limit. Vespene Gas is always 10% of it. From there:
- Faction Card first. It sets your starting Army Slots and which sub-faction units and cards you can take — Raynor’s Raiders, Kerrigan’s Swarm, Khalai, Nerazim.
- Tactical Cards for Gas. Each adds slots and your race’s resource (Command Points, Biomass or Psionic Energy). Non-unique cards stack; Unique ones go in once. Zerg armies take exactly one Creep Card, and the app says so if you forget.
- Units by size. Every unit’s size options are a button each, showing the Minerals and how many slots it fills — a unit fills slots equal to its starting Supply, so a full Marine squad takes two Core slots, not one.
- Upgrades priced for the size you took. Combat Shield is +20 on six Marines and +30 on nine, and the price follows if you change the squad’s size later — which you can, without losing the upgrades you’d already bought.
- It won’t let you overspend. An option that would overflow your slots, your Minerals or your Gas is greyed out with the reason next to it (“Needs 2 Elite slots; 1 free”), instead of a pop-up after the fact.
- Missions and Deployments. Each army brings two of each to the pre-game draft; the picker shows the ones for your Engagement Scale first.
- Copy the list as plain text to share in a chat or a tournament form.
Checked against the official builder
Every number comes from the official StarCraft TMG army builder: all 31 units, 229 upgrade and ability lines, 64 weapon profiles and 42 Faction and Tactical Cards were compared field by field, with no differences. Then we built the same 18 armies in both apps — every upgrade at every size, Gas spent right up to the cap, the order cards get refused in — plus a set of edge cases, and every total came out the same: Minerals, Gas, resource, Supply, every slot and every unit price.
Where the official builder and the rulebook disagree, Warp Nexus follows the rulebook:
- A unit or card can only join an army if every faction tag on it is on your Faction Card (so Nerazim Watchers need the Nerazim card, and Void Seeker isn’t offered to Khalai).
- Summoned units — Point Defense Drones, Pylons, Roachlings, the Omega Worm — come into play through abilities and aren’t mustered on the list.
- Two upgrades that replace the same weapon, like the Goliath’s Scatter and Haywire Missiles, are one or the other rather than both charged.
The official builder is newer than the rulebook’s own points tables, so where those two disagree we use the builder’s prices — Jim Raynor is 250 Minerals, the Corpser 240, the Warp Prism 35 Gas.
Rules you can tap
Switch the Codex to StarCraft and you get every unit and card by race, a short guide to how a game runs — the four phases, Supply, the attack sequence, abilities and resources, army building — and a glossary of around seventy keywords.
The same help is built into every unit card: tap PRECISION, LONG RANGE, BURROWED, a Combat Tag like Armoured, or a characteristic like Evade, and it tells you what it does. A Marine’s card has close to fifty of them. Ability text, card text and keyword help are written in our own words; the official cards and rulebook have the full wording.
Your armies, on every device
Signed in, your StarCraft armies sync the same way your 40k lists and battles do: build on the phone at the shop, open the laptop at home, same armies. Delete one and it’s gone everywhere. If you edit the same army on two devices before they catch up, you keep both versions — the older one comes back as “… (from iPhone)” — rather than one quietly overwriting the other.