I think 'nids have the benefit of being faster than orks, plus things like genestealers have a 5+ invulnerable save, termagants and hormagants are cheaper per model and can be taken in units of 40 whereas ork boys are maximum unit size 30. Also, with 'nids the first wave is often just a meat shield to get the monsters in for the proper fight - with ork boys you're relying on them to at least kill their points back when they do finally get there. I agree that if you want to run a non-imperium assault army 'nids are as good as it gets though.
God I wish they'd stop putting horde bonusses on 20+.. it's disturbingly difficult to actually make use of them..
You're telling me! Especially as they've piled up all of these bonuses you can never utilise as the 'main tactic' of the army, and then decided to nerf what decent ranged units we had to compensate for the amazing (useless) bonuses. Also, all models have to be in/on terrain for the unit to get a cover save bonus - we went through the store's entire terrain rack and there wasn't a single piece you could fit 30 bases on, so ork boys basically never get cover now.
Meh, it isn't just orks, it's the same with all the horde units. 20+ models are unwieldy, horde units are squishy so it's terribly easy to drop below 20, they're very suspectible to battleshock with their high numbers, squishyness & often mediocre bravery. This combined paints a giant bullseye on them, they're just easy pickings. And on top of that they're valued under the assumption that you do get the horde bonus, without that bonus they tend to be rather expensive.... Pretty much everything discourages hordes...
I haven't played enough to be sure on this. I want to try my hormagaunt and genestealer again. I think their speed and ability to ignore morale will help mitigate this to some degree.
You'll definitely need some means of mitigating battleshock if you come up against shooty armies; to be fair to my orks mob and rule kept them in the fight really well despite the horrific attrition rate.
Yeah, I'm thinking a Multithreat Overload style list might work. The first wave needs to be fast stuff that hits turn one or is right in his face. That lets you get your more dangerous mobs cross the field mostly unmolested.
I often found in the last edition that this style failed as you're effectively just feeding your army to your opponent in manageable chunks; perhaps that isn't so much the case now and it's definitely on my list of tactics to try. Unfortunately (barring flyers, which I currently don't own) there is nothing in the ork list that can hit turn one; assuming standard deployment of 24" apart, the best I can do is storm boys hitting on turn two (though I'd face losing 1 in 6 of them in order to do so because you know effectively take a dangerous terrain test to use their rocket packs) or truck boys who would get there turn two but not be able to charge until turn three due to disembarking now having to take place before a transport moves. All of this is also presupposed on my opponent being silly enough to not start backing away from me in his second turn. I'll keep plugging away at it as I don't have the sense to stop flogging a dead horse! I fear it's going to be an uphill struggle though.
That's what was the worst thing about fantasy 8th Edition I believe, the fact that they gave bonuses to hordes even though they are inflexible and really expensive to fill out money wise. The only time where I believe hordes are useful, and thus should be allowed, is Skaven because it works really nicely with Safety in Numbers.
Even skaven don't perform that well, with 4 bravery baseline and only a 6+ save on clanrats they can easily lose humongous chunks of their units due to battleshock. Safety in numbers won't do much for that.. unless I'm missing some rule..
You're talking about AoS. I'm not talking about AoS. It's 8th Ed Warhammer Fantasy Battle I'm talking about. In 8th Ed fantasy Skaven had the Strength in Numbers rule (sorry, not safety in numbers, my bad) which gave them +1 to their leadership for each extra rank of 5 or more models after the first rank. Now let us take a look at a horde of 40 Clanrats in 10X4 formation vs a bog-standard unit of 20 in 5X4 formation. At the start of the game, both would receive a lovely +3 bonus to their leadership, giving them a mighty Leadership of 9, same as a unit of Dwarfs or High Elves, because each unit has 3 extra ranks of 5 or more models after the first rank. However, the 5X4 unit would lose a point of Leadership as soon as they suffer their first casualty, because they would by this time have 2 ranks of 5 and a rank of 4 after the first rank, giving them only a +2 bonus rather than +3 and reducing their Ld to 8. The horde, meanwhile, would need to suffer 6 casualties before they would lose that point of Leadership, because by then they would have 2 ranks of 10 and a rank of 4. As such, you would need to kill off a lot more models in the horde to reduce their leadership to their pathetic leadership of 6 so that they would more easily fail leadership tests. In fact this is the only instance where I allow hordes to be used in my games of Warhammer 8th Ed. I have a 'house rule' when I play fantasy at home that unless you play Skaven you should not use hordes because it is not characteristic of the way the army would fight and because hordes are inflexible.
It would if you saw how pathetic Skaven leadership is without that rank bonus. Skaven will run away from almost as many things as Night Goblins.
I can see why this is the case - these boxes contain rules and a special formation for 7th Ed that you can use with the force provided, to allow new players to get going without the need to buy a codex straightaway. Because 40K is now in 8th Ed and the rules are quite different, the rules in the 40K Start Collecting boxes are outdated and will need to be replaced if they are to be of any use in 8th Ed. Hopefully they may put new stuff in because the Eldar one was rubbish and I was considering doing a small Alaitoc Eldar force without a Farseer. I'm still waiting for them to do a Start Collecting Fyreslayers or Kharadron Overlords for AoS...
I presume we'll be seeing a new and updated set of start collecting kits over time... But I thought it was interesting the chaos dudes were first... Maybe a death guard SC set coming along?
I'm not trying to advocate about whether hordes are good or not - I am trying to illustrate the reason why I only allow hordes to be used when playing with or against a Skaven army as part of my own 'house rules', because it has a nifty synergy with Strength in Numbers.
It may well be that GW are going to split the Chaos forces up into their separate Chaos Gods like they are doing in AoS, because we've already seen Khorne Daemonkin, Thousand Sons and now Death Guard appear. They'll probably next focus on Emperor's Children or World Eaters and eliminate the 'Chaos Undivided' theme altogether or perhaps just revamp the Chaos Marine box. I'm not certain about it. The same thing is happening with regular Space Marines - Ultramarines have become an army in their own right again rather than just being Space Marines with Ultramarines chapter tactics. They were an army in their own right in 2nd Edition but when 3rd Ed came about GW put them in with the other regular Space Marines. They now join Grey Knights, Dark Angels and Space Wolves as being a unique chapter army.