Building your Ork Waaagh! around army dispositions, with Adrian from Tabletop Titans

Yesterday, we heard from two Warhammer 40,000 champions about how to expand your Space Marines into a full army. Today, it’s the Orks’ turn, and Adrian from Tabletop Titans has brought his thinkin’ cap.

Adrian: Whether you’re brutal but kunnin’, or kunnin’ but brutal, the Warhammer 40,000 Starter Set gives you a great basis for many Orks lists. As you expand out though, you’ll really want to make sure you are building around a specific army disposition, as dispositions are at the core of how your list will play. 

As an example, we’re going to look at two different ways to expand your Starter Set. One list will be built for Priority Assets – involving a mixed list that has a bit of objective holding, a bit of killing power, and just a splash of units meant for doing actions – while the other list runs big killy squads for Purge the Foe or Take and Hold. 

Priority Assets

For Orks the only way to gain access to this disposition is to run Rollin’ Deff, the 1DP detachment for Battlewagons and Beast Snagga rigs. It’s a great detachment that really supercharges those tough transports, giving them the ability to automatically advance 6” rather than roll a dice – very handy for an army whose ability is to advance and charge once per game!

With this in mind, we’ll want another detachment that works well with Rollin’ Deff and gives us a good balance of objective holding, killing, and action units, so for this we’re going to go with Bully Boyz. This detachment grants us a second round of Waaagh! for our Warboss and Nob units, which I have found to be extremely useful for keeping momentum moving in a game. 

With Bully Boyz in mind, we want as many of our units as possible to benefit from that rule, so we will bring in everyone’s favorite Warlord of Warlords, Ghazghkull Thraka. He’s fantastic in a big unit of Boyz, but even better with a really strong unit to lead, so we introduce a unit of 10 Nobz with power klaws and an attached Painboy. The Nobz will make the unit harder to wound, and the Painboy will give us a 5+ Feel No Pain as well as the ability to resurrect a few of them once per game. It’s a tough, hard-hitting unit, which we’ll put into a Battlewagon with the Boarding Ramps upgrade for +1 to their charge rolls. 

We also want a second squad to bully enemies off of points, so let’s add a large unit of Squighog Boyz joined by Mozrog Skragbad himself. Mounted units really enjoy the new layouts where they can stage in safety behind an area terrain before bursting out at full speed. With Mozrog being a Warboss, this squad will also benefit from the double Waaagh! 

Each 10-man Boyz squad will be joined by a character – a Warboss in one and a Weirdboy in the other. The Weirdboy is nice here as it can set up for a late game ‘Da Jump’ to teleport into your enemy’s backfield, which is perfect for the missions where you need to take your opponent’s home objective! The Warboss squad works well to flip control of an objective in No Man’s Land without committing a more expensive squad. 

Now we have our bully squads, but we still need some support. Priority Assets is not just about fighting and holding objectives, but also about being in the right place for actions. To support this we have two units of Stormboyz and Boss Snikrot – also a Warboss! – who are perfect for the job. I also highly recommend a unit of Kommandos, as they can be staged in the midboard to be able to perform early game actions, and split into two squads for more flexibility. Our Wartrakk can perform a similar role, staging in the early game to be able to zip out to the middle and perform actions. 

Last of all, I’ve added Wazdakka himself. While he doesn’t benefit from either detachment, he’s a great and fun unit. He is a wonderful combination of extreme movement, terrifying melee, a splash of scary shooting, and has Lone Operative. These all make for a very flexible unit that is able to be whatever we need. 

Purge the Foe

With our Priority Assets list set, let’s talk about Purge the Foe! As you can imagine by the name, Purge is all about killing your enemies and trying not to die in return. For this list we are going to run one of my favourite combinations of detachments: Freebooter Krew and More Dakka. Freebooter Krew, like Bully Boyz, is a great toolbox detachment, granting us the ability to automatically advance 6”, turbo-charge our damage output on an objective of our choice, and we can even put a unit into Waaagh! at will. 

It really gives us lots of staying power. Pairing this detachment with More Dakka is what gives us access to Purge the Foe, as well as some more reliable ranged damage. In Purge, you want to reduce your unit count as having more units can be liability for your primary scoring in several matchups. Having said that, we do need our utility units! 

Kommandos perform perfectly in the same way as our first list, and we’ll take Boss Snikrot for another tricky tech piece. Now, let’s talk about the kill bricks! 

Ghazghkull is still great, and in this list we are going to give him some Meganobz. Freebooter Krew allows us to put them back into Waaagh! whenever we want, and this means they can remain durable for as long as we want. They are a bit slow, so the stratagem to automatically advance 6” will help us here. 

While we will be taking another big unit of Squighog Boyz, they’ll be led by a Beastboss on Squigasaur instead of Mozrog so they can take the Da Kaptin enhancement, which allows us to remove battle-shock from a nearby unit for the measly price of a few mortal wounds. 

Now, remember when we took More Dakka? This gives us some sweet options, and we are going to run two units for this purpose. First off, we have a big unit of 10 Flash Gitz who will be joined by the new Bannernob, equipped with a Git-Spotter Squig to ignore cover. They’ll have their own Trukk to be able to position them at a good shooting angle. 

Our second shooty squad is a unit of Tankbustas joined by a Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun. While the squad won’t have the all-important Ignore Cover ability, we can spend 1CP for Long, Uncontrolled Bursts to gain it. That, combined with the Tankbusta bonus against Monsters and Vehicles, makes them a force to be reckoned with. 

So you can see, there are trends you can follow across multiple detachments, but there are also ways you can lean in a particular direction to support the Force Disposition you are running. Ultimately these are just two directions you can take, and there are many more in this deep roster of amazing models and units the Orks have access to. Find the playstyle that matches you, and you will have a blast no matter what!

Fancy taking a crack at an Ork army in the new edition? New starter sets go up for pre-order this month, including the new Getting Started with Orks set, and it won’t be long now until Codex: Orks – the first new Codex of the edition – darkens our doorstep.