Waaaagh!

So, I got completely tabled by Gav's Space Wolves on Thursday in Round 1 of our club's 1000 point challenge. I used the Ork list from the comment section of this post which I thought looked pretty good on paper but actually turns out to be not that good on the table. Actually, I think that they're okay but I didn't use them very well in this game. As always, here's my cathartic list of things that went wrong. Hopefully someone will learn something from my mistakes. Hopefully, at some point it will be me!

Deployment

With hindsight, after getting second turn (even though I managed to steal the initiative) I should have placed everything in reserve. The only thing that Gav had that could reliably harm my Battlewagon were his 4 Wolf Guard in the Drop Pod. If I'd let Gav have first turn with all of my army hiding in Reserve, he would have had to drop the Pod somewhere and then I would have had the opportunity to come onto the board so that I minimised the threat of those four guys. As it was those four guys almost single handedly won Gav the game. They blew up the 'wagon, killing 10 Orks inside and then killed the remainder of the squad as I charged them in.

Siezing the initiative

I made my Scout move with my two Deffkoptas to hide them behind a ruin, with the intention that after Gav had moved his Rhinos I could jump over it and engage them. Then I went and stole the initiative which meant that they were out of range for a turn. This is again highlighting the idea of having a plan and actually sticking to it.

One thing I did do well

Gav was setting up a charge against my Bikes with his Grey Hunter Pack. Before he did he shot them with his Long Fangs causing one S8 wound. I allocated it to the guy at the front and when he failed his 4+ cover save he was removed from play. This left the Grey Hunters well out of charge range. Choosing which models to remove can be a bit of an art form. You can use it to keep yourself out of combat or to ensure that the right models get to strike back if your already stuck in.


In general I was unlucky to come up against an army with so much S8 and S9 shooting as that can easily cut through the bikes. Having said that the Warboss actually got killed by Living Lightning after I put two wounds on him thinking that he'd either make one of his 4+ armour saves or a FNP save. I think that it's going to take a bit of time before I really get the hang of Orks. There really is more to them than line up, move, run, move run, move, Waaagh!, charge. You have to be pretty careful with them in order to make sure that your charges count. Otherwise your low Initiative and rubbish armour save means that you can lose a lot of Boyz before you even get to strike. However, losing this game and only getting 6 battle points (Gav got the full 25) means that I should end up somewhere near the bottom of the table. So when the knock out rounds start I'll be playing someone else from near the bottom. And that's when I break out the Wolves. Mwahahahahaha!!