Why Orks Are Bad: Introduction

A Heuristic Analysis of Trend-Maximal Orcinian Militant Formations With Regards to Non-Interactive Communication Behaviour was a huge battleship text-of-wall by Abuse Puppy that hit the Interwebz a few weeks ago. It was what made me decide to collect information on Orks. Now since this is well over the 2000 word marks it will be broken down into more readable parts...

So following on the heels of my last article, let's transition to something much, much more specific: Orks. Specifically, are Orks a good army? Do they have strong builds, and can they be said to be competitive in 5th Edition? There are some rather strong opinions on both sides of this- the Ork Defense Force articles as well as Stelek's article on the subject are both fairly well-written, if rather adamant in their respective positions. So why is there such a huge divide on the subject?

To find the answer, I'll point back to my previous article on levels of play (and in doing so explain why I had to write that article first, you see.) Orks are an amazing army in low-level play- their raw numbers are fantastic, easily trumping most other armies. Their fast transports, powerful hammer units, and easy learning curve mean that even a relatively new player can expect to do pretty okay with an Ork army; in truth, few of the units in their codex are genuinely bad, although as we'll explain later they all suffer from their own problems. In the context of a low-level player/game, however, Orks are a very strong army.

As the game shifts into mid-level play, Orks don't look quite so overwhelming. The preponderance of vehicles in the 5E metagame means that they have issues to deal with, albeit ones that are certainly handleable. Blocking, multi-charges, etc are all mid-level tactics that Orks can take good advantage of and a properly-constructed Ork army can offer up some difficult target priority choices. At this tier, Orks seem like a fairly balanced (in the sense of "fair," not in the sense of "balanced army") force to bring to the table.

In high-level play, however, is where the problems crop up. Orks have very poor redundancy in several key areas, most notably tank-killing and heavy infantry killing despite what the interwebz thinks. They do not have good strategic flexibility and cannot easily adapt to an opponent's plan in the same way that some other armies can they have way to much randomness for starters; furthermore, they have no good counters to many of the strong top-tier plays and units and are stuck looking to less-efficient answers, putting them at an innate disadvantage.

Note that this does not mean that Orks, as an army, take less skill to play (they don't) or reward a general less for being skilled at low- or mid-level play. Rather, they punish lack of skill less, primarily through their ability to soak casualties to little effect and to have multirole units that can perform several needed tasks. They are reasonably robust at these levels of play and can have their builds and playstyles taken in several different directions without losing any of the fundamental strengths of the army; to contrast, a "finesse" army like Tau or Eldar is heavily reliant on key strategic and tactical decisions and very specific builds and setups- without these, they simply collapse into a worthless pile of fragile, expensive units.

- Abuse Puppy in Why Orks Are Bad, Despite What the Internet Thinks

Next up is a look at anti-tank...