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Hi there fellow members,


As some of you might know by now. I have been struggeling with my orks for quite some time now.

I have been camping the tactics and army list sections for a while now but havent found a satisfying answer yet.

To me orks are the coolest and da baddest army out there. I have been neglecting my boyz for quite a while since every game turned into a massive stomping on my orks.
I even had a couple of games of being tabled without scoring a single VP or kill. Yup that bad. I wont go as far to say that i am even a good player, but i dont suck either. Yet with my orks i just might.
My glorious days in fifth are far gone and even some good games in 6th seem like a lifetime ago.

I have tried the Zhadsnark list backed up with looted killkannon wagons and dakkajets and got shot off the table like a sassy git.
I have tried the green tide and didnt even manage a single assault, 4 games in a row. Wut? yes! i mean it. Way to lose your motivation huh?!

This led me to believe that the codex had been nerfed to a point where i was like... who the ffff made this crappy dex? I should find him and stomp him.

Copying a list without knowing the tactics behind the list didnt seem like a good idea. I have talked with numerous ork players and we all agree on one thing.
Every damn battle is an uphill battle. Winning is faaaaaaar from easy with our extreme low survivability... even though we have numbers.

Now i would like to ask you people to suggest some of the working lists out there and explain their ideas behind them and thus restore my faith in our green friends.

The lists that i have found and are working are few and all are build around Zhadsnark.
A list i found recently was build with Zhadsnark with multiple 5 man bike squads and a bully boyz formation. Does this seem worth it to you?

I usually play against very competitive shooty and flying lists. My opponents that give me the greatest problems are Tau and Dark Eldar ofc. And also Nids seem to like to devour orks as a mid day snack.

Tau usually spams suits with missles and dem stupid cheesy riptides/Markerlights combos
Nids has multiple flying bugs and has more coming.
Dark eldar.. Rofl they just spam me to death with their rapid fire weapons.

We usually play 1850 lists

Would you please help me out? I reek of desperation

I don't like Zhard lists.. My big concern is that what makes a bike tough is high toughness with a cover and armor save for low points. In terms of saturation for survivability, Mek gunz come out as a viable option, trading mobility for range. Mek gunz can plug any hole that a warbike can't fill. Try some counts-as action to get a biker boss and biker painboy and load up some mek gunz. Get a 3 Kannon/2 Traktor unit going with Two Lobbas squad And then a unit of something good against your meta. Then afford an Aegis for the whole ordeal.

The quantity of hard to shoot high toughness targets with saves would saturate and some of enemy lists will start looking beatable. Use your Traktor kannon's and bike gunz to ground. Try to operate your warbike squads maxed for your HQ delivery and minimum other squads to help direct where enemy shooting should go. Toughest thing about this list is finding viable troop options. I could see one defensive speed bump squad of grots, but after that its tough.

I just feel plain bad for orks, their codex has been awful for so long and they just made it plain worse in 7th. The lists I see as threatening are the ones centered around blitz brigade and bully boy formations with little else. Having 5 battlewagons with min guns(because ork shooting I terrible) and filled with assualt threats can be very scary.

As a tau player primarily I would have a tough time dealing with that because I have limited tools to deal with av 14. With my necrons I would be in better shape but with that many threats I would have a difficult time killing them before 3 of the 5 get into assualt.

If I were an ork player that's the angle I would pursue, something that gets in your face as quickly as possible. Maybe try to through a forcefield mek in there for some kind of save but really just prepare to take losses and force people into assualt.

Since flyers seem to be an issue in your meta I would suggest tractor cannons but this leaves your army split and your backfield vunerable.

I probably wouldn't worry about flyer armies too much. Just kill what they have on the ground and capture objectives. Again with orks its more of a case of play for a close victory never set your army up to table someone, because frankly they cannot do it reliably.

As an ork player, I have two thoughts.

You play with an all comers list which usually requires that you get as many models onto the table and to the other side asap.
Or
You play a surprise list with some walkers and fast attack to play a non horde ork army.

Bikes are strong, but they require only a couple bad dice rolls to go awry.
Huge hordes are tedious, but create enough of a threat to make the opponent consider where they need to spend their shooting.

In the end, the ol motto stays true with orks - boyz before toys
It still works in the 7th ed

Orks have it rough. We was meant fer fightin', so to balance the gits in GW hadta nerf us a bit.

But in truth, orks are the original "bad guy" for 40k. Basically, it boils down to "they can't win, or all fluff everywhere would die." That's not to say orks can't do well. But basically, they're designed to work okay-ish.

Remember. Orks aren't the toughest. Or the shootiest. Or the blobiest, or any of these things.

We was made ta fight. And as long as we fight, we win.

I have had massive success with my orks, in fact I have lost 1 game so far and realistically it was because my opponent accidentally cheated and brought 500 extra points to a 1,250pt game. I almost lost to chaos once but again my opponent played a rule horribly wrong and I had to correct him on it.

I don't have any usual lists i kind of just throw my orks together when i find out what army im playing. My favorites are 2 Battlewagonz filled with Lootas, Big squads of boyz with nob bp/pk and a Warboss on a bike attached to a 10 man warbike squad with a painboy on bike.

 Ghazkuul wrote:
I don't have any usual lists i kind of just throw my orks together when i find out what army im playing.

This called list building. Try building a standard list and have your opponents do the same. Let us know what the outcome is.


@Grobnub - There could be a number of variables for any game to go wrong. What kind of missions are you playing? Is there a good amount of terrain? Any list building going on? It could come down to just bad dice rolls or bad tactics.

BossMakk wrote:
Orks have it rough. We was meant fer fightin', so to balance the gits in GW hadta nerf us a bit.

But in truth, orks are the original "bad guy" for 40k. Basically, it boils down to "they can't win, or all fluff everywhere would die." That's not to say orks can't do well. But basically, they're designed to work okay-ish.

Remember. Orks aren't the toughest. Or the shootiest. Or the blobiest, or any of these things.

We was made ta fight. And as long as we fight, we win.

lol, what are you babbling about?


I'd roll forward with min battlewagons filled with boyz. Also lootas.

That's cool. Just because you don't understand doesn't make it babble. Everybody has different levels of comprehension, and different ways we interpret things.

I was being encouraging, and saying that the joy is in the game, not the win. And orks are designed to be the "enemy", not the winner. If you get what I'm saying.

BossMakk wrote:
I was being encouraging, and saying that the joy is in the game, not the win. And orks are designed to be the "enemy", not the winner. If you get what I'm saying.

I got what you're saying. Agreed.

Gundor2 wrote:

 Ghazkuul wrote:
I don't have any usual lists i kind of just throw my orks together when i find out what army im playing.

This called list building. Try building a standard list and have your opponents do the same. Let us know what the outcome is.


@Grobnub - There could be a number of variables for any game to go wrong. What kind of missions are you playing? Is there a good amount of terrain? Any list building going on? It could come down to just bad dice rolls or bad tactics.

Well since we don't play like @hole WAAC players we don't really care about "list building" but list building implies that I know exactly what my opponent is going to bring and customize my list to beat it. What happens at my store is we walk in and go up to someone "hey want to play...yeah? ok what army you playing? ok im playing Orks 1,500 points GO".

If thats wrong then ohh well :-)

The only time I nearly lost with orks was against a regular opponent who deliberately tailored his list to beat the ork army he knew I had.
TBH, I just find it a challenge. I must be doing something right if they fear the ork so much they have to specifically build an army to beat it.
I usually play some variants of the following, depending on points value....

Warboss & Nobs, PKs and Big Choppas with EA
Big Mek with KFF/MFF KMB
Painboy
2-3 Mobz of EA boyz upto about 20 boyz with Nob and PK (vary EA acording to points playing too)
Battlewagon
Trukk
4 Mek Guns
Lootas
Tankbustas
Occasionally I'll bring a DakkaJet, but not had one do anything useful so far.

That's it, no walkers or much else fancy. Pretty plain but a solid performer so far.
However, I am a pretty aggressive player, and I will go after weakspots and stomp them into the ground when I spot them. I always play to fluff with my Boyz, and it tends to work too.

From what I've seen on these forums is that any sort of deathstar unit for Orks isn't the way to go, sure its fun but not always wholly effective. All of our deathstar options have glaring weaknesses - Zhadsnark bikerstar is good unless you face ignores cover or flamers, council of Waaagh is so slow after you disembark from your transport, etc. I guess the exception to this would be Green Tide which appears to shake up 'the competetive meta' but is still easily beatable if your opponent knows they're playing against Orks and builds their list accordingly.

In my opinion the best way to list build is spread your threats around, such as having Mega Nobz in a wagon alongside Boyz + Lukky Stick MA Warboss in another and some equally costed good units in more wagons. But man, I love battlewagon's

From my limited experience its best to stick with a theme; all on foot, all mounted, or as close to this as possible. Other things to avoid are the Waaagh Ghazghkull detachment (some of the formations are great, the detachment is almost unusable because it makes a painful Mob Rule even more punishing) and we have a few units that are rarely used because of incredibly overcrowded slots. Most notably heavy support but also HQ. Going with two CAD's or multiple detachments is mandatory for me, and thankfully our troop choices are either very flexible or very cheap.

The most important thing to remember has already been said in here, primarily play just for the enjoyment of the game and treat a win as a little bonus - its always fun to play with Orks!

If your looking to have fun with orks then go buy yourself about 3ish boxes of your favorite demons. Then field an ork army containing the following

1 Big Mek SAG
2x Weirdboyz (Demonology)
1 Fighta Bomba (HILARIOUS)

Those 3 things right their make for the most fun EVER!

I played a game with 2 Weirdboyz using Daemons where I basically summoned 30 little Demons and then one of my weirdboyz became a greater Daemon or whatever it is and went to town on a Chaos players own big flying daemon.

@schan122 I've been playing a walker/vehicle list, believe you me it does not lack in terms of still feeling like a horde army. 12 Kanz stretch all the way across the deployment area, and at 1850 points you can still build to get roughly 5 trukks of gits or 2-3 Battlewagonz of gitz with creative nobz and meganob choices.