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Hi,
I don't play in a super competitive environment and I'm as happy to cheer on my opponent as I am to table him but I have attend some events at Warhammer world and not done too badly, and my usual opponents are pretty good in making fun but effective army lists and using them well. I play exclusively as orks and I've played against all factions in varying degrees (mostly Eldar and CSM) bar tyranids.


What works.
Boyz (with nob PK and BP) + pain boy. For 270 points you can have a ball of 30 boyz all with FnP. Yes they die quickly but with use of cover you can reduce that a bit. The things is they need to be dealt with, and dealt with turn 1 or 2. If they are ignored then they will bring great pain to your opponent. cheap and deadly your opponent needs to drastically reduce there numbers before turn 2 or hide deep within his deployment zone. Remember to space them out well and minimise your opponents blast/large blast/template damage. Personally I take 3 of these in a ork horde formation. Then take a CAD with 2 min squads of gretchin and warboss on bike with PK. this all comes to 995 (iirc). With this you put enough boyz on the field to easily win a game if ignored. They wont be. but that's not the point, threat saturation is. They nearly always perform very well and once painted I'll experiment with 4.

next, I have 6 FA slots to play with. 5 lone deffkoptas with twin linked rokkits work wonders. Scout them and Turn one you're pinging side armour, turn 2 you are ganging up 2 or 3 and CC any AV10 rear armour vehicles or get into CC with devastators, dark reapers, heavy weapons teams. Get them into CC with things you don't want to be shooting at you. You have a fairly decent chance to win combat against these targets and if not you will likely tie them up a turn or 2, enough to get your boyz up to deal the hammer blow. You can put a buzzsaw on and I've taken my opponents by surprise and taken down all sorts of armour and even killed a squad of warspiders (with a little luck). Honesty I prefer them cheap and without any additions.

With the last FA you can take bikes, storm boyz, whatever you fancy really. Maybe another deffkopta.. lol. After your opponent has played against you like this a time or two he will shoot the cr*p out of those deffkoptas. The jink save on them and T5 is great. They can take quite some shifting, especially all 5 single koptas. don't field them as anything but singles. More than 1 and your opponent and take multiple ones out with a single squad of shooting and if they just take one out, you are taking leadership tests on them... don't waste your points. I've had opponents spend their entire first turn shooting at them and take 1 down (I was a bit lucky though), usually I loose around 3 of them if they focus a bit.

you have 6 HS slots... wow... great!

A couple of squads of min lootas do well, quite random but I've had games where they've really shone, others where they've sucked, but mostly they will be pretty useful. but the 2 squads in ruins or whatever cover you can find and accept they may get shot at. I find its quite unlikely as the opponent will be annoyed at having deffkoptas threatening his back line from turn 1 and they've still got 90 FNP boyz running hell for leather at him.

2 kustom megakannons with ammo squigs and some spare grots. Throw in a shokk attack mek if you like as your final HQ spot and target armour or concentrations of elite units. Nearly always make their points back with careful placement of the grots and kannons will take a bit of shifting. Prone to certain attacks and CC but if you leave a small about of boyz trailing off your blobs back towards the mek guns it will often deter your opponent.

5 lobbas. Take them min, hide them out of LOS. 3 ammo squigs I find is enough. With all the other stuff going on they are again likely to spend a good 3-4 turns shooting without being targeted. Once they are targeted the game is either won or lost in my opinion, don't waste points on the extra grots. If they are shot at, your opponent is hitting a T7 target whilst the boyz getting closer. I use my gretchin to form bubble wrap around my mek gunz. buying an extra turn for anything striking at them.

I've just painted up my meganobz so not tried them. They will basically slot in (in a trukk) as another immediate threat like the koptas, If they divert shots from my boyz then its job done. I may consider 2 of them as I think with orks you need redundancy.

I'm currently converting my tankbustas and I'll slot them in ASAP. They will likely be like the lootas, 2 min squads with a couple of bomb squigs but run the first turn to get into some ruins and try and then threaten the whole of the centre board, I'm really not sure how well that will work but I can see their potential. Not sure they will fit with my strategy.

What doesn't work.

Killa kans. I've used them effectively maybe twice. I've tied up a chaos lord with a strength 'user' weapon in CC for almost the entire game with one of them (he only had a krak grenade to attack with). Also the second was a tricky tactic pull off. It involved 'da jump'ing 30 boyz in front of my enemies army. His whole army charges the boyz (rather than be charged by them the next turn). I take severe casualties but then jump out in my next turn. Almost his entire army were all bunched up like sardines. As you can guess, the grotzookas, lobbas and kustom mega kannons, wiped out most his army in a single shooting phase. Other than that, they tend to shoot something turn one, then get mowed down by anything that glances at them. If your opponent spams strength 4 attacks (who does that?) then they might find a use.

Deffdreads, again only time I used it effectively was when the opponent flew his ML3 demon prince (or something along those lines) right to me, the lootas grounded him and the deffdreads (I had 2) tore him apart with the minimum of effort. I've recently got a new model for it (I was proxying before) so I will be playing in my next few games because its new and painted. I plan to use it to guard my back line lootas and mek guns, or move up with the boyz if I don't feel there will be any threats against them.

Flash gitz. Ok, they can work, in the right situations. But my way of playing is to saturate my opponent with stuff and the game is usually decided by turn 3 or 4. They don't fit in with this list. If they move they are a lot less effective and their range isn't sufficient. I've put them in trukks, in ruins, foot slogging (heh that was stupid).. They need another 12" range then I'd consider them, (they also deserve the 4+ armour too). You can find the right situation where they kick ass, I've mowed down squads of terminators, but it was a case of right place at the right time and rolling a 1 or 2 on the AP value, my opponent was also using a very none competitive fun list. Before I used them I saw someone comment that they needed many things to be just right for them to shine, and whoever said that was spot on. Take them if you have a few spare points and don't need to rely on them. That's when you will get those golden moments with them




Everything else I think (I've notbook in front of me) is more middle of the road. I do think rather than just hoping for the best and letting tactics win the day orks require a pre thought out strategy. Threat saturation offensive, threat saturation defensive (shooty), MSU etc. For me, orks have always been about large numbers of disposable troops, its what seems fluffy to me. And I think 90 boyz with FnP sums up the idea of the green tide washing towards you, you may shoot off a limb but he is still going to try and chop you up. Although it doesn't work out like this always but I put enough boyz that they can win the game if delivered unimpeded. If they aren't, and get wiped out to the man, then I have enough on the table that you can wipe out the vast majority of their army before the last boy drops. Its never all or nothing like this but its fun to play.

The real main joy of playing orks, and orks like this, is they will give your opponent a hard fought game win or lose. If they loose, and sometimes they can be a little sore about it, you can balm their wounded ego by just showing them the tray where you keep your casualties. Often seeing nearly 100 models that they have killed piled up will make them laugh or at least smile. If you loose, you will most likely have given them a bloodied nose at least. Against cheese and rerollable 2+ deathstars it will likely loose handily, though to date I've not suffered tremendously.


TLDR: threat saturation and redundancy are the key + boyz, accept you'll take losses.

So many still use nob bikers, but my question is can you easily replace the role of the nob biker squad with defkoptas?
A nob biker with pk is 70 pts
A defkoptas with buzz saw is 55pts.
While a defkopta doesn't have a turbo jink bonus, or a s8 pk, they still charge hit at s7 ap2 (hit n run allows the chance to charge multiple times), have a better gun, and can hop over terrain better then a bike while being faster, defkoptas can be ran single model for lone wolf buzzsaw, or in 5 man squads with hqs (give them zadsnark for 3up jink, Painboy for fnp, warboss for challenges and initiative bonus for the hit n run and you have a decent deathstar.)
I've yet to run defkoptas like this, but I'll let you know when I can.