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.

My friend who. Plays Orks is having a rough time of it. I play SW, GSC and Tyrnids. He plays orks. He feels like he is loosing a lot.

Are there any tips for him?

I thought maybe I could kitbash him some mech gunz, are those stil good? They hit on bs4+.

It would help if you could give some details on what he usually brings and what you usually bring.

He always brings:
2 dakkajets
1 psyker
3 to 5 groups of boys
A small truck
A battlewaggon with the deathroller
6 squigriders in 1 or 2 groups
5 to 10 flashgitz

He sometimes bring:
Warlord
Warlord on squisouer
Snake bites names character
Morkanaught
Gorkanaught
Dreadnoughts (killa kans?)
Nobz

I usually play:
SW dread castle
GSC twisted helix
Leviathan nids

To me it feels like he has a lot of low damage shooting and a few things here and there with an okay punch in melee. And I'm guessing if he is having trouble versus your armies, that they revolve mostly around bigger, high toughness multiwound models.

Heres a couple of ideas for him:

Bring the Beastboss on Squigosaur and give him Headwoppa's Killchoppa and maybe take the Bigkilla Boss Beast Snagga warlord trait if hes up against a lot of vehicles or monsters.

Maybe consider a Shokkjump Dragsta? They have some high strength, good AP and good damage weapons and get "decent" BS on their main gun.

Try a game where he plays his Dakkajets as Wazbom Blastajets, they pack a bit more of a punch.

Killa Kans with Rokkit Launchas could also be a good option depending on how many he has. I'd say a unit of 5 with rokkit launchas, could do some serious damage.


Aside from that there is probably a lot of decision making that could swing things. Secondary objective selection, aggressiveness etc. If he just moves everything forward and hopes to reach you eventually and still have enough damage to do anything, obviously that won't work. Are you guys playing with enough LoS blocking terrain? This is crucial for a melee army like orks so they don't just walk up the mid field and die. If you want to make the games a bit more fair, maybe adjust the terrain distribution in his favor, so your guys are more in the open and he has more cover to work with.

 M0ff3l wrote:
To me it feels like he has a lot of low damage shooting and a few things here and there with an okay punch in melee. And I'm guessing if he is having trouble versus your armies, that they revolve mostly around bigger, high toughness multiwound models.

Heres a couple of ideas for him:

Bring the Beastboss on Squigosaur and give him Headwoppa's Killchoppa and maybe take the Bigkilla Boss Beast Snagga warlord trait if hes up against a lot of vehicles or monsters.
https://seriale.best/
Maybe consider a Shokkjump Dragsta? They have some high strength, good AP and good damage weapons and get "decent" BS on their main gun.

Try a game where he plays his Dakkajets as Wazbom Blastajets, they pack a bit more of a punch.

Killa Kans with Rokkit Launchas could also be a good option depending on how many he has. I'd say a unit of 5 with rokkit launchas, could do some serious damage.


Aside from that there is probably a lot of decision making that could swing things. Secondary objective selection, aggressiveness etc. If he just moves everything forward and hopes to reach you eventually and still have enough damage to do anything, obviously that won't work. Are you guys playing with enough LoS blocking terrain? This is crucial for a melee army like orks so they don't just walk up the mid field and die. If you want to make the games a bit more fair, maybe adjust the terrain distribution in his favor, so your guys are more in the open and he has more cover to work with.

Oh yes! Very specific until I test it.

Are you guys opposed to using Legends units?
If your not, check out Big Gunz. A very modest
pts investment gets you some nice bs4 firepower.

Well, the short story is that he is running all the worst units of the codex in archetypes that doesn't work with the current game. Orks are a shooting army and yet he has next to no shooting. Boyz do not serve any purpose beyond troops tax and taking up space, and nauts are just straight up a waste of points.

It's not a surprise that he doesn't stand a chance against a somewhat coherent army list from a decent codex. IMO both lists are so bad that neither is salvageable.

What kind of games are you playing? What does his collection offer? Is there any specific type of army he wants to run (waaagh/speedwaaagh)?

In discussing it he seems to want to run a lot of boys. Reliving the joys of the green tide.

He has started that there are no good shooting units in the codex. He wants to be melee. And he does not like the looks of the new buggies/cars.

I would how ever like to identify what they good shooting units in his codex are.

my friend wants to run a green tide ork army also, and he has had some trouble with it too...

Probably pick Goffs if he wants a melee army, or snakebites. The snakebite character on squigasaur is very good, so that is something.

I would say the best ork shooting that i've gone against are deffkoptas. They can put out a huge barrage of rockets, and they can deep strike to guarantee that they get the shots off if you want.

I'm told the flyers are good too, but my opponent doesnt field them so no real comment.

Theres also lootas, which have the firepower but you sort of need to run gretchin sheilds in front or they will die quickly to shooting. It's a decent idea, but I usually have enough shooting that I can mow down 30 gretchin and still have firepower left over to hit the lootas anyway. So its pretty risky.

For a greentide your friend has two options: going goffs with a list that focus on assault turn 1-2 with multiple units or going deathskulls with lots of obj sec specialists.

Just avoid lots of boyz. Max out the stormboyz, kommandos, etc... instead. A couple of trukk boyz/meganobz are good.

Bikes, koptas, mek gunz synergize well enough with footslogging based armies and they're probably needed in significant numbers.

Greentides based on lots of boyz are terrible as boyz are among the worst units in the codex. At least make them 10 man squads to mitigate losses from morale and be more effective on objectives/secondaries. 6x10 boyz, 3x10 kommandos, 3x10 stormboyz is already a proper greentide with 120 infantry orks and it's leagues better than going something like 4x30 boyz.

Niiai wrote:In discussing it he seems to want to run a lot of boys. Reliving the joys of the green tide.

Well, boyz are terrible, and the traditional green tide doesn't work because of that, full stop. He might get slightly better results by running beastsnagga boyz, because they have an actual functional profile, but they are too expensive to get to the critical mass where you have more bodies than the enemy has bullets.

He has started that there are no good shooting units in the codex. He wants to be melee.

Successful melee lists revolve around storm boyz, kommadoz, kill rigs (often filled with beast snagga boyz), MANz, anything riding a squig and trukk boyz. Depending on how competitive you are you could probably also make kanz, dreads, bonebreakas and burnas. Once again, you need to avoid any boyz that aren't trukk boyz if you are playing to win.
It's also pretty essential to make them goff, otherwise you hit like a wet noodle. Thrakka is neither great nor terrible, so it's up to you whether you bring him.
If you have the right units to utilize their stratagems, the bloodaxe supplement also can be a somewhat decent choice.

Blackie's post also is a pretty good summary of what to do when trying to run lots of infantry.

I would how ever like to identify what they good shooting units in his codex are.

Kannonwagon, koptas, wazzbomb, mek guns, kill rigs and, of course, buggies, are all great shooting units.

apogats wrote:Probably pick Goffs if he wants a melee army, or snakebites. The snakebite character on squigasaur is very good, so that is something.

Sorry, but avoid snakebites. Their culture is hands down the worst one in the book. If you want Mozrog, you can just bring a patrol with him as HQ and gretchin for troops.

Theres also lootas, which have the firepower but you sort of need to run gretchin sheilds in front or they will die quickly to shooting. It's a decent idea, but I usually have enough shooting that I can mow down 30 gretchin and still have firepower left over to hit the lootas anyway. So its pretty risky.

I agree with your observation, both gretchin and lootas just die to fast. The only real use for lootas I have found was inside a boss bunka because it's cheap and durable, but that's not a real strategy for winning games, more of a silly trick to pull to throw your opponent off track.

You can't mix detachments from different cultures in the same codex in 9th these days. But every other advice has been good so far.

I'm assuming the two of you are playing the absolute gak GT missions. This is largely the problem. The gakky GT missions make for poor game play because they heavily reward a specific style of play. So... Instead of the typical comments you'll receive... "Take this, don't take that, this unit sucks, blah, blah, blah" all in an effort to push you and your friend to conform to the competitive 40K bs; I instead recommend...

1. Try playing games using the new Tempest of War cards. These allow armies who are not optimized for the competitive meta to be played and have a respectable chance of winning.

2. Try playing games using the Open War cards. These can be a bit one-sided and/or have some wild win conditions, but that's the point. They're not focused on 'hold 1, hold 2, hold more' or gakky rinse & repeat secondaries. One game may be more favorable to you, but the next more favorable to your friend. If you're able to let go of the notion of balance in favor of simple enjoyment of the game, playing with your models and having fun with your friend... The Open Wat cards are a real winner.

 Niiai wrote:
You can't mix detachments from different cultures in the same codex in 9th these days. But every other advice has been good so far.

Actually you don't need to, the rule only states that all <Clan> keywords must be replaced with the same one. You can still have clan-locked units from other clans (like Mozrog). As the troops for your detachment you either pick 'orrible gits or trukkboyz. As your patrol detachment then exclusively consists of snakebites and specialist lads, you then gain the snakebite culture for Mozrog.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 oni wrote:
I'm assuming the two of you are playing the absolute gak GT missions. This is largely the problem. The gakky GT missions make for poor game play because they heavily reward a specific style of play. So... Instead of the typical comments you'll receive... "Take this, don't take that, this unit sucks, blah, blah, blah" all in an effort to push you and your friend to conform to the competitive 40K bs; I instead recommend...

1. Try playing games using the new Tempest of War cards. These allow armies who are not optimized for the competitive meta to be played and have a respectable chance of winning.

2. Try playing games using the Open War cards. These can be a bit one-sided and/or have some wild win conditions, but that's the point. They're not focused on 'hold 1, hold 2, hold more' or gakky rinse & repeat secondaries. One game may be more favorable to you, but the next more favorable to your friend. If you're able to let go of the notion of balance in favor of simple enjoyment of the game, playing with your models and having fun with your friend... The Open Wat cards are a real winner.

Sorry, but "hurr, durr, competitive bad" won't help here. I play all sorts of game modes and what is stated here is pretty much an universal truth. If you build an ork list around ork boyz with no shooting, you will get tabled with little to no impact on the game, no matter how friendly and fun the missions are.

The only advice I can offer is to know your audience. If your friend is running subpar lists, consider also dialing back the tuning of your lists so that you aren't seal clubbing.

It's entirely dependent on the player, but I can tell you for me, moving away from optimization of lists was the best decision I ever made with regards to both of the GW games I play. That remains true as long as my opponent has a similar or same philosophy.