Dozens of skirmish maps are available for two to eight factions in skirmish mode, and most of them have been ported in from previous editions in the series. You can live without aerial units in solo play, although smart human players online tend to use them a lot for the aforementioned lightning strikes on key map points. Combat aircraft just seem to give you a boost in speed, letting you pull off quickie attacks to seize critical strategic points and relics. Aerial units have been added to all factions, including both of the two new ones as well as the seven existing ones, but they don't make any serious impact on gameplay.
Enemy AI is spectacularly dumb on easy difficulty and a pretty stiff challenge on normal, which makes for a big leap if you start on the bottom rung of the ladder. If you've already developed solid playing styles for the Imperial Guard or the Orks, you don't have to make too many changes to be effective while fighting as the Sisters or the Dark Eldar. But even though these features give the factions plenty of personality-particularly the Sisters, whose Canoness leaders screech loony battle cries like 'Witchcraft, heresy, and mutation!'-neither brings much new to the table when it comes to gameplay. The Dark Eldar are almost as memorable, due to a nifty slave-and-demon thing going on with regard to units, and a new soul-essence resource that powers enemy-blasting combat abilities. The Sisters are most notable for such downright spooky units as the Penitent Engine, which consists of a heretic strapped to the front of a crucifix bot loaded with flamethrowers, and a faith resource that juices what amounts to battlefield spells. Here, the two new sides are the fanatically religious Sisters of Battle, a group of pissed-off space nuns who take Catholic guilt to a whole new level, and the sadistic Dark Eldar, who chow down on souls for fun. The big additions to the Warhammer 40K family are, once again, two more factions and a nonlinear campaign based on a Risk-style turn-based tactical map. When you get right down to it, Soulstorm is pretty much a carbon copy of Dark Crusade.
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