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I am currently getting back into 40k after a long time away. Of course going orks by title of thread. I been having an issue with how many boyz to bring in my army. I see all the elites and they look awesome but expensive cost for a unit that can just get wiped. I just don't know how effective some of these units are versus just loading up on more boyz. So I am more less just want to hear your experience and what your ratio of boyz to special units are?

Too many boys? Ha! As if.

In all seriousness boys work best when you drown your opponant in them, if you don't bring enough then they're just easy killpoints.

In game terms I don't think there is too many. I saw a good list that was just a Waaagh band formation that had 6x20 boyz (all with a PK nob) and a 10 man nob biker star with painboy, big mek and warboss. It looked like a very strong list to me

In practical terms would you want to assemble and paint that many boyz though?

If you run the Ghaz decurion then you have to run a lot of boyz, otherwise the rule of "boyz before toys" isn't quite as true anymore. You can make a great army out of a bunch of trukkboyz, but a bike list is just as viable, and with Mek guns orks have some toys that actually work. Orks have a lot of dud units, so if you avoid those then you'll be fine. (There's an ork tactica somewhere that goes into more detail).

I'm looking at taking a nob unit to roll with warboss and thought about another unit of nobz. I'm rolling for about 2000-2500 point army. I'm just on the fence about another nob unit since I can get like 40 more boyz for them. I am also curious to use the Burns's in a transport or tank bustas. Haven't had to much use with them. I love battle wagons and thought about running Burns's and itank bustas in one but also thought about 20 hard boyz and a pain boy since I have a lot of points to spend figure heavy army upgrade won't be too bad

Nobs are really weak compared to either a similar amount of boyz or MANZ. Burnas are fairly bad too after 7e changed it so you can't kill stuff outside the template with wounds generated by a template weapon. 19 ard boyz with a painboy is a decent unit, but can only really threaten infantry and isn't as tough as you'd think it is, so be careful. Tankbustas in a battlewagon is usable, especially in the Blitz Brigade formation that brings a bunch of battlewagons and gives them scout.

No amount of boyz are too many. Boyz over toys.

(This advice can be taken too far, but it's pretty hard to. Most of the time peoples' budget/patience for painting boyz runs out long before they've reached too many boyz.)

I can't say much about ratios, but when I see Orks be really effective, it's usually because they're swarming with 100+ boyz. We had an ork player for a while that fielded 140+ models and it was terrifying.

There are some hard counters to that type of army, but it will usually shake up a local meta if people are trying to make TAC lists. It's hard to make an army that can handle that many bodies AND be effective against some of the more "elite" builds from Tau or Eldar.

Yeah my hard boyz I was planning run in bw and some storm boyz to hopefully take out a couple units I don't want to deal and give a distraction for my boyz to move up or try to hold objectives and maybe take some heat off lootas. I guess main concern is missing out on very effective units because I focused so much on boyz. But I guess boyz are more effective. At end of day it seems like you just gotta ask how many naked orcs can suffocate a terminator when building an army. I just had this feeling with mega nobz, and especially them,if a dreadnaught gets close or a few las cannons and there goes a chunk of my points

It's pretty common to see a competitive list with 0 boyz in it. People usually run biker hordes and a stompa or just min boyz and meganobz or some crazy lists like artillery spam with megaarmored characters or solo deffkopta spam. Personally i prefer to have a min squad of trukkboyz just cause i allready have big guns to sit on backfield objectives and extra grots feel like a waste.

That's a case of power creep. Boyz aren't bad but they severely lag behind all the insane crap other codexes get => if you want to win you have to min-max on counter-meta stuff. Good for casual and semi-competitive games though.

Anywayz, you can get a functional and sometimes even decent list with lots of boyz (most likely when they're in trukks cause footslogging slow mellee units without magic are extremely weak now). And you can get a functional and sometimes even good list without any boyz at all.

5th edition answer -> there is no such thing as too many boyz.

7th edition answer -> Why would you ever want to field boyz ?! There sure are some boyz lists mainly truck boyz lists but those are to be fielded as a swarm of suicide squads. Regular footslogging boys just do not cut it any more since allmost all shooty targets move faster than us: Eldar, tau, skitarii and all close combat orientated armies just beat you in combat.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BigChalupa wrote:
Yeah my hard boyz I was planning run in bw and some storm boyz to hopefully..

Storm boyz are even worse. There is just no way that you can afford to pay that many points on a 1w T4 6+ sv model. Sure a large blob of them will kill one medium / soft unit in turn 2 if you handle them right. But this squad is going to be really expensive and you will lose quite a lot of models in the process. So you will be a wounded sitting duck in in turn 3 .... This is not something should be wanting to pay ~300+ points for.

I mean more boyz the more fun, but that doesn't make it more competitive sadly. In casual games load em up, in competitive games there are a lot of good toyz.

WHen every single suquare inch of the board is covered, when the sheer amount of boys blocks out the sun ... only then do you have enough boyz to have a blast... but you will lose still against competitive lists

on a 6' x 4' board that is 3456 boys if I did the math right to cover evry inch base to base

side note boyz armies are nice but boyz are overcosted for that they get but that is a different discussion, needs feel no pain or make them 5 points per model and make eavy armor a 2 point upgrade.

also need to tweek challenge rules for orks where they just ignore them or at least make nobz I4 currently they just die before getting to swing a claw or even their axe

This is well defined by the recent ATC rules: No Green Tide
http://www.whatc.org/warhammer-40k.html

I just wish that they'd understand if you give some one crap shooting skill make them more scary in close combat. I think they should bring old choppas back or a modified version of it and on furious charge give them a first strike in combat rule on charge only. I always said to that should shooters should have between balistic and less str. Give sluggas more strength and less balistic. And do that with different units. I don't think it's hard to fix orks and make them more viable. I don't think they are bad but you can't just play them as thoughtlessly as space marines. I always hated they have str 3 like a guardsman when they bigger than space marines