Why Orks Are Bad: Part III

Continuing wall-of-text...

Part the Third: The Art of War

While certain sites may overestimate its applicability to the game, Sun Tzu's classic book on warfare can actually be summed up into one very useful point: never let the enemy fight the way he wants to. If someone brings a static gunline to the table, your first priorities should be forcing assaults and movement on him, because he is poorly-equipped to handle these tasks.

This is where the inability to stop AV14 starts to come back to haunt Orks. One of the strongest "rock" armies in the game, using a Land Raider to deliver TH/SS Termies and backing it with strong shooting support or other assault elements, simply takes them to pieces. Both of the common Raider variants (Crusader, Redeemer) will cause extensive damage to the Ork forces on their own and the contents are all but untouchable- the Hammers in the squad will make short work of Nob Bikers and Lightning Claws combined with No Retreat will inflict pretty horrific casualties to large mobs of Boyz, already weakened from the Raider's shooting. Since they have no meaningful ways of threatening it with shooting- even Rokkits are a slim chance at best- Orks are forced to send in units to assault it (exactly what the Terminators want) or to try and block it (which they have few options for, since Trukks can't be expected to do so thanks to Ramshackle). Deff Rollas can wreck them with reasonable consistency, but they do so only by putting themselves right in the heart of the enemy formation, meaning either the unit they carried dies to the Terminators (bad) or they are running empty (also bad).

But that's only a single army. How do Orks fare against other major strategies? Another popular example might be the Alpha Strike army, which intends to shoot the enemy right off the table early on and never look back. Many armies deal with this by either using a refused flank (awkward for Orks because of the large footprint of their army) or by holding in reserve (also a poor choice because Orks have no reserve manipulation and aren't mobile enough to rush in from off-table- they're fast, but not that fast.) So we have another major strategic failure, as this sort of army is almost perfectly poised to annihilate Orks with its plethora of high-strength ordnance and other powerful shooting. Over and over again, looking at any given army's major stragegy, the Orks' only real counter to it is "get stuck in, kill them all." Now, this in and of itself is not a fatal flaw- indeed, it's the fundament of most hammer armies- but it is a major weakness that, combined with their other flaws, starts to push the army towards unplayability in high-level matches.

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