Friday, September 17, 2010

Orks vs. Double Land Raiders: A quasi-battle report

Last night I finally got my first game in with my Ork list, against my friend Vince's double Land Raider list w/ Khan.  He recently got Best General at Tacticon, which is the 44 person tournament we just had, so he's not a bad player by any stretch of the word.  I wanted to try and see how Orks could do against double Land Raiders, and Terminator spam.
I'll give you the highlights, since I don't really have time to do a full blow-by-blow account of the action.

Here's his list (roughly):

Khan
Librarian w/ Null Zone and Avenger

5 Assault Termies w/ 1 Lightning Claw, 4 TH/SS
5 Assault Termies w/ 2 Lightning Claws, 3 TH/SS

5 Tactical Marines w/ Razorback (LC/TLPG)
5 Tactical Marines w/ Razorback (LC/TLPG)
5 Tactical Marines w/ Razorback (LC/TLPG)

Land Raider Crusader
Land Raider Crusader

Land Speeder w/ MM/HF
Land Speeder w/ MM/HF

He ended up getting to go second, which isn't what I wanted at all, since we were playing Capture and Control.  In objective missions, I tend to want to go second, so I can contest/kill people off of objectives on the final turn.  Going first tends to give me issues.

But, he got first turn and reserved/deepstruck/outflanked everything he had.  So, I got 2 turns of walking around before he actually showed up.

The Kommandos came in, and walked onto his objective, trying to get some cover, since they couldn't do anything.  They would wander around aimlessly the rest of the game, never doing anything.  At all, lol.

The Wagons were/are awesome, with the KFF giving off the perma-smoke, they shrugged off 2 penetrating hits by Vince's Multi-meltas on the speeders.  Quite a few times in the game, I'd move the Wagon up it's full move, and let my guys use boarding planks to kill vehicles- it ended up killing a Razor and 2 speeders.  Or maybe they only killed one speeder.  Still, boarding planks are invaluable for only 5 points.  The deffrollas are good, but Vince was smart and kept his Raiders away from the wagons.  I only ever got a single Tank-shock/Ram, and it failed me.  Heh.

Ghaz was valuable as well.  He declared his Waaagh! on Turn 6, getting my guys all a good Run result to hold/contest objectives.  Without those 6" of extra movement, I wouldn't have been in nearly as good a situation to hold his guys off the Objective.  He also butchered 5 Tactical marines all by hisself.  What a champ.

The 18 boyz proved their worth, dragging down 5 TH/SS Termies, with minimal (haha, acceptable) losses.

Lootas did well too, popping a Razor and killing a speeder.  For their two rounds of shooting (before they met death by Termie), they killed their two targets.  Pretty good ratio, if you ask me.

Nobs got assaulted by 4 tactical marines (at the end of the game, with him attempting to pull them off his objective), and killed them promptly.  heh, they still held the objective at the end of the game.  Good job, nobs!

It was sort of a weird game, since he moved his guys onto the board far to the right of the objectives, and I was already on the left of them.  It made the game feel like we were playing from the short board edges sometimes.  The whole game I was worried about Khan, since he didn't come in until turn 5.  In the end, he didn't come in on the edge Vince wanted, which put him in a tricky situation.  If he'd come in earlier, at least I could have done something to counter it. /shrug  Gotta love dice games!

In the end, he had contested my objective, and I held his, a win for the orks.  :)

And so, everyone did their part, except for the Burnas, who just kinda sat there waiting with no good targets, and the Kommandos, who also just sat there.  Overall, I'm very happy with my list.  I think there's one thing I want to do to change it:

Take out the Kommandos, and replace them with more Lootas.  I'll probably talk about why in a later post.  Until then, I guess I'll get outta here.

One other thing:  during the game, Vince told me a few times he thought Orks were broken, particularly the Deff Rolla being able to affect vehicles now.  Up til now, I'd thought the general consensus was... not that.  I don't feel like they're broken at all, but what does everyone else think?  Just curious.

2 comments:

sonsoftaurus said...

Just because something can threaten the existing meta builds (mech, multi-wound wound allocation units) does not mean that it's broken.

Unknown said...

So the interesting thing is that Vince got into 40k post original deffrolla "ruling". Or near thereabouts. He never got used to the absolute dominance of battlewagons+deffrollas in the early months of 5th Edition. The general consensus then, and I maintain now, is that deffrollas are a single piece of equipment that pushes the Ork Codex one way or they other. Without them, the Orks have some issues dealing with mechanized lists, without at least a little bit of luck. With them, the army steamrolls through a lot of mech lists, especially elite mech like SM variants. This effect is magnified by the use of a KFF and the current melta environment.

There are some responses though, including for this game. Vince really should have screened his Raiders with the skimmers when in fear of an imminent 'rollaing. The skimmer provides a cheap +3 save to simply stopping the deffrolla in it's tracks, and puts the wagon front and center for a decent response the following turn. Lootas are the big concern for the speeders, but he was going to have to manage that situation anyway.