[purepolarpanzer]

Yeah, I'd never leave home without my stormboyz and kommandos. The slow shooty mob just isn't a good idea without fast movers to crash a flank and put your enemy between a rock and a hard place. However, the slow shooty mob makes a fantastic anvil for my stormboy/warbiker + warboss hammer (with kommandos coming in as needed in crisis spots.)

I'd also agree that a seer council is pretty easily toasted by shoota boyz. A full shoota boy mob is throwing almost 20 wounds at the seer council. Even rerolling the 4+ invuln with fortune that results in about 4 dead warlocks.

Also, the KFF mek is usually joined to one of the boyz squads, making blasts and templates used against it only affect the squad as a whole.

Everything he said, plus you being kinda silly. I didn't say to NOT use stormboyz, which, hmmm, give you the charge, power claw, and maybe not 60, but alot more boyz than any other unit out there except gaunts, and they suck.

I have yet to see any close combat unit beat even my shoota boyz. Your talking about a 30 person unit, ws 4 t 4. You need to kill 19 just to give the possibility of them running, and meanwhile your catching between 50 and 80 attacks per round. The sheer number of wounds you make makes any unit short of genesealer HOARDS useless. and at 20 pts a model, you still lose out while you kill 6 pts orks.

Lootahs can't see the whole board, but anything that doesn't want to get shot by them has to hide all game or die. They DO see most of the board, and most particularly they see any tank not hiding. Put them on a hill and you can snipe anything on about 1/3 the board. 1 shot each at bs 2 is not good, but 3 is awesome, and the average of 2 is still great. That's like having 15 predators firing at one time. I hear that kills alot, and it's the best anti- Eldar skimmer weapon I've seen.

As far as the jump infantry/tranport idead, it's laughable What transport makes it across the board to actually get to the orks? Falcon Gravs. What is effective against orks when it piles out? Dire Avengers. Bladestorm kills alot of orks... but not enough when 1/3 of them are in 5+ cover. :mrgreen: Short of ten man space marine jump assault units or deepstriking units, no flamer is going to make it across the board to hit your guys. And better yet, I havn't seen a flamer heavy army in a long time. We definately will be seeing them, but this is BECAUSE orks are so good and defy all the accepted anti-MEQ tactics of the game.

I always use a KFF Mek and a Shok Mek. Shoks are high priority targets, and they have just as much potential to be a waste of points as they do a game winner. True, on average they kick ass, but that's why I use one. KFF may not earn it's points back from protecting boyz, but the question to ask is do the boyz earn its points back and their own when, because only 1/3 of shooting wounds were kills and so many cross the board, they smash through a marine squad or two.

 

[Culler]

Don't worry pure, I was never under the assumption that you were running without quick troops. I've seen your army list and seen you play it. I've also seen one of your 30-man shoota boy mobs go down in 1 turn to dire avengers bladestorming w/doom out of a wave serpent despite a KFF.

Personally I prefer one Mek or the other, though that really more comes down to personal preference. I feel that my warboss is needed to supplement my quick element and I also am loathe to part with him for the fact that I'll have nothing that can stop armor 14 vehicles except my footslogging nobs (who aren't likely to have the privilege of meleeing an armored foe unless the tank comes to them) and my 3 kannons (who glance on a 6 and have a 4+ to hit...netting a total 24% chance to get a glancing hit with all 3 of them firing)

 

[shortgoth]

I have yet to see any close combat unit beat even my shoota boyz. Your talking about a 30 person unit, ws 4 t 4. You need to kill 19 just to give the possibility of them running, and meanwhile your catching between 50 and 80 attacks per round.

I'll make this my final post on the topic since I don't want to belabour a point, but how on earth are you getting 50-80 attacks per round from shoota boys?

They have 2 attacks each. With a shoota they don't get a bonus for 2CCWs. So that's a maximum of 60 attacks (+2 for the nob if you bought one).

And that's at a full squad. If you get 2 flamer templates on the boys, that's at least 10 Boys down - not including any other shooting.

So 20 boys, 40 attacks - if they're all engaged. However, at I2 anything that charges them is going to clear out at least 6 boys on the charge (serious CC units often kill more than that).

So that's 14 Boys - at the most - left in the unit.

How many of those will still be engaged after you've removed the casualties? Even if the mob started all in b-t-b (bad idea with template weapons on the board), they'll have been thinned out by flamer+CC casualty removal

Say you've still got 5 boys engaged? 8 even maybe? That's a far, far cry from 50-80 attacks "per round". And S3, I2 attacks at that.

Granted, the counter-charge can be nasty. But if you're running multiple units of 30xboys, at least 2 of those squads are going to be hit in such a fashion - and given the amount of space massive mobs take up, you'll be quite lucky to get other mobs of 30 across the board to enter the CC (esp with difficult terrain in play etc).

It's all pure theoryhammer of course, in the real world everything depends on the battle itself, unit positioning, terrain, and so on - but proper CC units have nothing to fear from shooter mobs in CC since they can clear 1/2 the boys out of the killzone due to I2.

Some ork squads are very deadly on the charge (Stormboys can get all their numbers in along with their Nob or special character, Kommados are vicious given they get numbers+Nob+can still have a pair of power weapons, Nobs are insanely good on the charge). Shoota boys are far from deadly when recieving one .

As for transports making it across the board to orks, so far I've had Rhinos, Chimera, Raiders (coming out of WWP), and of course Grav tanks all make it safely across the board so far - so that's pretty much every transport in use in the game . Playing both with and against Orks I see a lot of things hapenning that made me give up on 30-strong shoota mobs as anything other than ground-pounder objective holders and close-range fire support .

As for flamers getting delivered by squads - Marine assault squads (pretty sure Raptors can still carry flamers too), SoB Seraphim (nastiest flamer squad in the game since they carry 2 and they can re-roll wounds), Kommandos, anything in a transport (some squads can deliver flamer+Heavy Flamer), anything that drops/deepstrikes in (although I wouldn't risk DS anywhere near Orks personally), then vehicles such as Hellhounds (24" range on that flamer and you can place the template anywhere within that range), Skorchas, plenty of units can deliver flamers in all honesty mate .

 

[psychomidget99]

I dunno. I've got enough boyz to worry about losing them all, and I reckon its just too expensive.

 

[Culler]

I've never lost a cc with a shoota mob. The 50-80 number comes from 60 attacks from the full mob or 90 on a charge. They can generally kill 5 or so marines from shooting, so talking about them getting taken apart by another unit after taking huge casualties from shooting without that other cc unit having to weather their impressive fire is not realistic.

Here's how it generally goes for me: I space my shootas about 1.5"-2" from each other, leading to a huge spread out mob. I lose incidental numbers from shooting as they're typically more worried about taking out my fast units that are going to be in CC on turn 2. Any squad with the balls to square up with my shootas generally gets torn apart by shooting. Anyone that actually makes it to melee takes apart the few boys they can reach on the charge and then get piled into (fearless, so it doesn't matter that I lost the cc). Then they've got 20 or so boyz in cc with them. I've never had a cc happen with fewer boyz than that in the 5 or so games that I've played with orks so far. That's enough boys to give quite a good krumping to their depleted foe even after losing a few more from cc. Flamers typically aren't a huge threat since they're usually fired from 4 or 5 inches away, and wound the boyz on a 4+, generally killing 2 or 3. A hellhound might be another story, but even it's not going to kill its points in boyz and it will certainly be the target of my considerable anti-light tank fire.

tl;dr: Shoota boys (unsurprisingly) can shoot their cc foe before they get into melee and so usually only fight depleted units. Those cc units that do charge annihilate only the few boyz they can reach due to spacing and then get overwhelmed once they've lost their momentum. If they hit and run, it's shoota death all over again.