Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

It's something that's always bugged me, but why aren't Orks, the two metre tall muscle clad beasts they are, strength 4 in the rules? They must be much stronger than humans, eldar or tau, as we can see by looking at the models.

They're stronger but not strong enough to merit going up to strength 4.

Each point of strength is an exponential increase. So strength 6 is way more than double strength 3 in terms of real strength.

isn't WS4, T4, A2 and Furious Charge good enough?

isn't WS4, T4, A2 and Furious Charge good enough?

This, there hardiness is represented by the fact they are T4 and have a natural 6+ armor, that's not armor it their thick hides.

SpankHammer III wrote:have a natural 6+ armor, that's not armor it their thick hides.

Armour? orks have armour? 6+ you say?

I don't think I've ever had to roll an armour save for my boyz outside of CC

Lol, it's only there to make lasguns look even worse.

It's there so you can roll more dice. people enjoy that right?

Yeah got to get some more dice rolling, I mean first rank fire second rank fire with a 30 man blob just doen't get enough.

Seriously though S4 would break orks, S5 on the charge and all those attacks would be

Nitros14 wrote:They're stronger but not strong enough to merit going up to strength 4.

Each point of strength is an exponential increase. So strength 6 is way more than double strength 3 in terms of real strength.

HAHAHAHHAHAHA
HAAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHA

Don't try to apply external logic to 40K please. Getting mad and running at your enemy increases your strength exponentially, no matter who you are? PLEASE.

The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

chrisrawr wrote:

The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Nobz are S4

And an ork boy is almost 1/3 the cost of a marine. I'd say they are quite balanced.

Orks get the charge, they have a good advantage. You deny the charge, you exploit their weakness. Its called strategy

Mainly because it would make the game so difficult for other people, I want my orks to be Str4. It makes sense in the fluff.

But it would be a tad powerful.

]

chrisrawr wrote:

The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Start paying 15+ points per model for ork boys.

kenshin620 wrote:

chrisrawr wrote:

The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Nobz are S4

And an ork boy is almost 1/3 the cost of a marine. I'd say they are quite balanced.

Orks get the charge, they have a good advantage. You deny the charge, you exploit their weakness. Its called strategy

Actually, that's tactics. But enough about semantics; Think in a bit more general terms; Ork stats don't match the fluff because marine stats don't match the fluff because if they did they wouldn't sell as many models (and certainly wouldn't account for nearly 50% of army of sales), because players wouldn't need as many for their 15-2000 point battles and tourneys (assuming the models were balanced for their points) - despite costing roughly the same $$ per model to create and buy (assuming they don't inflate for in-game value).

The statistics scale of 1-10 is a throwback from the ages, severely limiting the ability for more units to be fluffy - but to attribute any sort of rhyme or reason to it other than 'loosely based on the statistics of space marines', and then 'loosely balanced by people with limited design access to other codecies' is fallatic reasoning.

As an Ork players Strength 3, furious charge always felt right. When you picture a nasty smelling, foul tempered, warrior I picture either an Ork, or the guy at the end of the bar whose been there all night.

Both should have furious charge, a strength and initiative motifier on the charge. When I think of a Space Marine, he should have a static, heroic statline.

If you bump up orks, you lose that. PLUS you get into ridiculous stats for cost factor. if you want to bump a Ork boy to str 4, you have to mitigate the cost. Then Nobs would goto str 5, and warboss to a natural str 6? That's starting to Creep into a Monstrous creature for the Warboss... which is way to high.

I felt the need to use the Bar angalogy.. we came up with it while we were in Boston this weekend

chrisrawr wrote:Don't try to apply external logic to 40K please. Getting mad and running at your enemy increases your strength exponentially, no matter who you are? PLEASE.

Maybe their furious roars of anger/excitement startled the enemy enough that they aren't ready to take the blows, meaning the wild orkish swings are able to hit places they couldn't before, or the enemy doesn't take the blow as they are trained, and it is able to do more damage.

Maybe the orks charge forces the enemy away from their advantageous position, and gives the orks the higher ground, or forces the enemy into a bog or uneven terrain, again making them unable to take the blows as well.

Maybe the massive wall of flesh running at you had enough momentum that the axe swing was just plain stronger.

Its an abstraction, stop trying to take it so literally. Its not meant to be an accurate simulation of a battle.

Or it could be that because of being pumped up by the idea of charging those Umies the orks have some kind of super adrenaline surge and they really are stronger for that first attack. Or maybe its just because they are running fast and hit harder because of it.

I wonder if say in 6th edition CCW are AP - will ork choppers be say AP 5? or 6? I think this might be something khorne Berserker axes will get too and Chainswords may even be similar, it make sense that a chainsword would penetrate armor better than a combat knife.
IIRC choppers used to reduce any armor better than 4+ to 4+, thats a bit OP so given a low AP would seem ok.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And when I say low AP i mean a high one haha

So 5 str on the charge? As much as I would love that, It would be so broken.

I'm not the one taking it literally; he applied a definitive value to the difference between S3 and S4 (exponential). We know that S3 is 'human' strength; the problem is not that orks get stronger when they charge - it's that bandying about intellectually lazy explanations like "S4 is exponentially stronger than S3!" without stopping to think what that actually means that I'm calling out, as well as "Well, S4 covers a range of strengths!" These fail to address the issue, which is that as a game, Warhammer is piss-poor for simulationist purposes.

Yes, the game is described using abstractions based on dice rolls. Keep talking down at me as if I'm dense, I'm sure that that's one way to make friends.

You're taking offense at what I'm saying simply because it's criticizing - even if it's criticizing a very obviously silly statement. Pull back and look at what was said, and how it relates to the context of the game, and how the context of the game fits into fluff, and how the fluff is filtered for consistency. My argument is NOT that orks shouldn't have rules that make them strong enough to rip people bodily apart when they're rampaging across the battlefield. My argument is that the mechanics of the game are not suitable for representing the difference between 'human strength', 'superhuman strength', 'servos meant for hauling space-ship parts strength' and 'metal-shearing with ease strength'. My argument is that the market is not set up in a way that allows miniatures to be sold in a fashion that promotes balanced gameplay because of the wildly differentiating strengths and powers of each factions' units. My argument is that inserting poorly thought-out, intellectually dishonest and lazy rationalizations for 'how strong' each strength-level is is NOT conductive to improving a game as abstract as warhammer 40k, and orks would be better served by altering their supporting rules, rather than their statline.

chrisrawr wrote:
The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Or because str 5 Orks on the charge would be broken. Oh I just get 90 str 5 attacks on the charge, nothing to worry about, right?

Buttons wrote:

chrisrawr wrote:
The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Or because str 5 Orks on the charge would be broken. Oh I just get 90 str 5 attacks on the charge, nothing to worry about, right?

Would be fine if various values were changed so that this was there gimmick bro. They've simply stuck with the lower values of the 1-10 statline for too many codecies for it to be an easy fix anymore.

chrisrawr wrote:I'm not the one taking it literally; he applied a definitive value to the difference between S3 and S4 (exponential). We know that S3 is 'human' strength; the problem is not that orks get stronger when they charge - it's that bandying about intellectually lazy explanations like "S4 is exponentially stronger than S3!" without stopping to think what that actually means that I'm calling out, as well as "Well, S4 covers a range of strengths!" These fail to address the issue, which is that as a game, Warhammer is piss-poor for simulationist purposes.

Yes, the game is described using abstractions based on dice rolls. Keep talking down at me as if I'm dense, I'm sure that that's one way to make friends.

You're taking offense at what I'm saying simply because it's criticizing - even if it's criticizing a very obviously silly statement. Pull back and look at what was said, and how it relates to the context of the game, and how the context of the game fits into fluff, and how the fluff is filtered for consistency. My argument is NOT that orks shouldn't have rules that make them strong enough to rip people bodily apart when they're rampaging across the battlefield. My argument is that the mechanics of the game are not suitable for representing the difference between 'human strength', 'superhuman strength', 'servos meant for hauling space-ship parts strength' and 'metal-shearing with ease strength'. My argument is that the market is not set up in a way that allows miniatures to be sold in a fashion that promotes balanced gameplay because of the wildly differentiating strengths and powers of each factions' units. My argument is that inserting poorly thought-out, intellectually dishonest and lazy rationalizations for 'how strong' each strength-level is is NOT conductive to improving a game as abstract as warhammer 40k, and orks would be better served by altering their supporting rules, rather than their statline.

I agree with parts of what you are saying: 40k is a terrible simulationist game, it definitely needs to be more granulated. Clearly I got the wrong end of the stick there, I wasn't trying to be offensive or talk down to you. Its just the way you said it spoke to me the same as hundreds of people I've seen who assume that the rules equal what is literally going on the table, and so went ahead trying to explain something we clearly both agreed on. That said, if you ignore the fluff irritations it causes, I havent had too many problems with it from a mechanical standpoint, and adding more values is only going to end up causing more balance issues.

because GW wants you to buy grey knight models....duh

Putting my opinion in for sake of discussion; It won't matter now if Ork Boyz have Str 4 or even Str 5 on the charge. With the new 6th ed rules Orks just got violated by pretty well everything that's SM and MEQ. For example: Overwatch and disembarking nerf. Im not even going to comment on Orks +6 armor in comparison to SM 3+. CC= 1's and 2's Boyz. 1's and 2's...

Apparently orks dont get power klaws on regular nobs anymore, either.

chrisrawr wrote:Apparently orks dont get power klaws on regular nobs anymore, either.

Doesn't surprise me. Already nerfed KFF. Our only hope of getting to the other side. Oh wait Hull points already done that job. Hello mass Long Fang/Razorback spam and Lascannon spam from IG. There is no Mork and Gork anymore.

their wont be until the golden times are ressurected and we get a new codex to make us competitive again (its ether that or orks stop being orks and we all stop supporting GW, I love my orks and if I cant spend my money on them and still have a half assed chance in hell of winning, then GW CANT HAVE MY MONEY.

chrisrawr wrote:Apparently orks dont get power klaws on regular nobs anymore, either.

How can this be possible? I very much doubt GW would put a rule sauing "Ork Nobz don't get PKs lol" or an Errata saying the same thing. I think you may be thinking of how casualties from shooting are now removed from the front. So, you won't place your PK Nob at the front, will you?

chrisrawr wrote:

Buttons wrote:

chrisrawr wrote:
The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Or because str 5 Orks on the charge would be broken. Oh I just get 90 str 5 attacks on the charge, nothing to worry about, right?

Would be fine if various values were changed so that this was there gimmick bro. They've simply stuck with the lower values of the 1-10 statline for too many codecies for it to be an easy fix anymore.

Why should being able to beat marines man to man on the charge be their gimmick? Space marines have always been better than Orks in the fluff, changing that is slowed since Orks have always relied on numbers. If you like the idea of str 4 Orks, just spam Nobz, which are str 4 Orks with some other nice bonuses tossed in.

Buttons wrote:

chrisrawr wrote:

Buttons wrote:

chrisrawr wrote:
The ONLY reason Orks are S3 is GW's warped perspective of "lolbalance" - they can't be space marines!

Or because str 5 Orks on the charge would be broken. Oh I just get 90 str 5 attacks on the charge, nothing to worry about, right?

Would be fine if various values were changed so that this was there gimmick bro. They've simply stuck with the lower values of the 1-10 statline for too many codecies for it to be an easy fix anymore.

Why should being able to beat marines man to man on the charge be their gimmick? Space marines have always been better than Orks in the fluff, changing that is slowed since Orks have always relied on numbers. If you like the idea of str 4 Orks, just spam Nobz, which are str 4 Orks with some other nice bonuses tossed in.

I think you're taking me out of the context of the rest of my posts; if we alter a large number of values so that S5 orks on the charge can mean something special in relative terms to the rest of the game, we can start progressing into more varied and unique rules elsewhere. Orks, Guardsmen, and Marines are the best place to start due to the relatively large and varied number of models fielded by such armies.