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I have been playing for a while now with my orks in tournaments running different styles of lists ,but i just cant seem to break into the top 3 of any given event .I normally rank in the top 5 but it gets kind of disheartening winning all of the games but losing out on placing. So i started to think maybe it was my army i know some armies are just more competitive then others but i dont want to use that as a cop out ,but the game7 seems to be changing in ways the orks cant compete with forcing us to go shooty and hitting on 5s just isnt all that great for shooting .The question is when is it time shelf the army and try again with something else .

Dear New Dakkadakka User,

In the future, please take the time to space out your wording so that readers do not have to attempt to decypher the great "Wall-O-Text" to understand what it is that you are trying to say.

Thank you for your time and have a nice day.

So what are you asking? Are some armies better than others?

Yeah, they are. Is the game balanced? No, not really. These things happen.

You can play competively with different ork styles and still place in the top 5? I wish a few of my armies were that flexible.

Hey Azgrim. What particular builds are you playing? This is probably more of a topic for tactics or army lists but part of it is making sure your playing to the missions. Orks should rarely go 3-0 and not win a pure BP based tournament. Reason being they are an army prone to massacreing or being massacred. If it's got a paint score attached to overall or sports/comp you might need to look at something other than your army as the reason your not hitting the top spot. Just some thoughts.

You have to remember that in a competitve setting, you are not the only one with a competitive list. Everyone is try to win, even if you think your list is solid, there might be some flaws other players will use to there advantage. Every army is competitive in its own way.

I play orks as my main army, and tooled up well, they do very well. I think (covers head under table) that they are the strongest army in the game, but as mentioned every army as its flaws.

I'm going to move this thread to Tactics. It will slip off the front page quite fast in Discussion.

to answer hulks question about builds ive tried kan wall with shootas ,multi battlewagons and trukks ,and nob heavy lists in competitive play. Out come is pretty much the same with every list

I don't think orks are even close to the best army in the game but they are still strong enough to compete and take advantage of the randomness of dice since loosing models doesn't hurt them much. But I wouldn't get too down on your self if you placed in the top 5 multiple times. I don't care what army you play if you are placing that well continuously your doing something right and its only a matter of time before your on top. Seriously its a tournament and most people the best list they can and play it as well as they can if at the end of the day only 3 or 4 people place ahead of you, your doing just fine.

Orks are one of the weaker "good" armies. They have fair number of builds that can work competitively, but they are prone to falling just short against better players running better armies. They still can pull off a win, but it takes tighter play than the armies rules sometimes allow.

Considering how many armies are bad, need of updates, or are stuck in mono build land, orks aren't bad at all. They just aren't the best there is.

Where are you playing is my question? For example, in a local event with 16 players, sifted into top and bottom halves, 8 rise from the first game, 4 from the second, and 2 from the third. Thus if you go 3-0 in a 16 person event, I dont see how you hit 5th without some other factors that have not been mentioned yet.

Sure its possible that you got 3 minor wins, call them 13/20. That still puts you with 39 points. Someone with 2 20's will beat you, BUT this is unlikely to keep happening over and over.

This missions there are pretty easy to only pull a 13-16 in which is probably why he still gets minor wins and doesn't pull in the number one spot. If he's talking about tournaments at The Realm in Brea, CA then the only points outside of BP's are up to 3 paint points which are hard to miss as long as your army is 90% painted. Best advice I can give is really sit down and make sure everything in your army has a purpose and really take a second to think about the scenarios before deployment and think about the minimum needed to pull in full points before the game even starts. When it starts at the beginning of every turn re-read the objectives to help you re-focus. Eventually it's second nature but it can take a while to play for the win every turn.

How big is the turnout per tourney?

16ish

Depending on how battle points are tabulated, and if the even is a peer scored comp event, it is possible to do well (win all games) and still finish in the middle of the pack. So it might just be getting screwed either justifiably or not by comp, low battle points (barely won) or by typical social network tanking of scores (sportsmanship counting towards BPs). I've seen it happen so many times I wonder if that is what might be at work here... To many times the winner of an event has a loss while undefeated guys go home with nothing.

Well the last 2 40k events I've made it to in the same store I won and went 3-0. This store is actually the most BP centric store I've been to. No sports, no comp, and only 3 points (out of 63 total possible points on the day) are for painting. And as long as 90% of your stuff is painted you get those 3 points (doesn't even have to be painted well). So all I can think of is that he's not winning by enough (i.e. 3 minor victories). Which going back and palying the mission all game could help.

Well, with 16 players, and 3 rounds, it hard to come up with a winner with just W/L (impossible, as you need 4 rounds with 16 players using swiss pairings)

In a battle points system, it is possible for a player to win all his games, but only by the smallest margins, and not even come in the top 5. It is possible for a person to lose a game by a small margin, then massacre his other opponents and win the whole thing. It's truly a bad scenario when that opponent who barely beat him, was undefeated. It has happened (not to me, but it is still BS when happens to somebody else)

Those are the biggest reasons why I don't like BPs as the primary ranking system. The top players should have the top W/L record. With BPs, it is possible to win events or rank higher than people with better records.

So my solution is to use a Swiss pairing system with BPs as the final type breaker at the end of the event. So out of 16 players, the 2 undefeated possible would come down to which had the higher battle points. Or you could just have a 2 player final round. (not always an option, but it is better than having a perfect record and not winning) Also no reason why you can't have the best generals going to the top 2 (for when a final isn't possible).

Notabot, while you are correct in that swiss pairings would help in this issue, a bigger issue is that due to the nature of 40k, not enough games will be played in any event to really break down the winner via more win/loss data. Even with your swiss system with BPs as tiebreakers, too large a turnout and its basicly just BPs again.

To the OP, in a 3 round 16 person event, with BPs as the only victory condition, you need to play aggro in games 2 and 3 in order to earn a max score. Orks are kings of aggro! Game 1 you usually want to do well, but depending on who else is playing a minor win can sometimes have you dodge the best players in the hopes they knock each other out.

There is also a term 'clubbing a baby seal.' Basicly, if you get paired up with a newer/poor player, play for the table to max your score out. Just be sure to be nice about it, especially if its a new player, as keeping fresh faces in the hobby is better than taking a minor tourney.