Know thy enemy (Orks)

I meet a lot of players, some good, some bad. I have noticed that the one thing good players have in common is that they know their enemy. On the other hand, if a player does not even have a passing awareness of what your units are capable of, it is unlikely that they will be able to form a rudimentary battle plan, and are thus tend to get crushed by a surprise unit.

In the interest of making my reader a better player, I present the series know thy enemy, an in-depth look at what certain codices can do.

The first thing I noticed is the obnoxiously low cost of the basic ork. It is almost like the designers got together and said "you know what? Lets cut the cost of the slugga boy by 33% and the cost of a shoota boy by 25%." That is like having a land raider drop to 165 points. Obnoxious.

Due to this, an ork player can have a seemingly mathematically impossible amount of basic ork troopers. Expect to be heavily outnumbered by orks if you face them. In some cases, it may seem almost mathematically impossible to defeat the number of orks you could face. The best strategy is to reduce the mob size to 8 or below and hope they fail a break test.

Another fun strategy for the cunning ork player is to make use of a warboss on bike paired with a 10 model strong unit of Nob bikers. This unit is incredibly expensive, yet incredibly effective. Usually this unit is built so that few bikers are armed with the same equipment. What this allows the ork player to do is to allocate wounds to different "groups" of models. In effect, this unit can take about 7 unsaved wounds and not lose a single model. To make matters worse, the Warboss is T5 before the bike upgrade which means against a krak missile, he not only gets his 4+ invulnerable, but he also gets a 4+ Feel No Pain save from the obligatory Painboy in the unit.
Be very wary of this combination.

Now a brief talk about Tankbustas, in short, they suck. I have taken advantage of their special rules every single time I have played against them. Tankbustas MUST fire at a vehicle if they have line of sight to one. With their range of only 24", it is easy to place a vehicle 40 inches or so away and a unit of infantry or bikes 1 inch away and have it be absolutely safe from shooting or assault.

The looted wagon. This can mount a fearsome gun, which is battle-cannon-esque. One thing to remember when facing it is that every turn it must roll a die and on a "1" it cannot fire. Do not let the ork player forget.

Weirdboyz also have no choice but to use their powers, even if they do not want to.

I hope this gives my reader at least a cursory understanding of what the orks do on the battlefield, now go forth noble warrior!

-Mike