This from a commenter on my recent BoLS post:

"Thanks guys, good advice, but we have already tried alot of this and are still struggling with game balance.

I decided to get an Ork army, and he bought Eldar. We were both pleased when his orky [AA] kept the marines at bay and won, but we have since found the Orks to now be impossible to beat, due to numerical superiority. We have both played with them, using a variety of scenarios, but have yet to play a game where they do not easily wipe the board with the other armies, because they can afford both a large amount of AA, aircraft, AND still field significant quantities of land forces. We've downloaded and tried a number of scenarios.
Are there any particular scenarios that you have found to be good to play and well balanced that you can recommend we try?"

I'm goning to start my suggesting that artillery is this guy's friend.  

Who wants to wade in on this with me?

I'd ask how many points they are playing at and also the size of table and level or terrain.

Orks don't dominate in the uk tournaments, well Tiny-Tims speed freaks had a bad rep but have been beaten in the last year and don't seem to be as invincible as they once where.

I also wonder if they are playing with the 08 changes were flak gets -1 if it moves etc.

Yep, whirlwinds and Void spinners (nightspinners are ok). The extra BMs from Disrupt (eldar artillery) aren't very useful against warbands until you break them, but they're great for cracking smaller formations.

Move-shoot-move with the eldar is very effective against orks, especially if you can use the skimmer ability to always stay out of LoS, even if the orks double.

Use the wraithgate to dominate the board. Put it somewhere your opponent needs to go. If he stays away, his loss. If he comes close to it, move some guardians on and do a clipping firefight (with support, if possible). Keep jetbikes off board, waiting to come through the gate. Once your opponent knows they are there, he'll always be worried about when/where they could strike (warband about to break? move 35, shoot 30 gives 6 ap5+ at 65 from the gate).

Unable to beat Orks with Eldar?

I bet they are making the classic beginner´s mistake (relying on shooting to kill the enemy instead of controlling ground and movement) and haven´t grasped assaults, assault preparation and support fire fully yet.

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You know, I've always considered the orks to be the best army in E:A, and a difficult opponent for Eldar in particular.

I've heard the argument before that the Eldar must rely on assaults to defeat the orks, but that doesn't really explain enough for me to figure out how to beat the greenskins.

The problems I run into are:
a) the orks are just as good at putting BMs on my formations as I am at putting BMs on theirs. While the eldar my have better ranged shooting than the orks, grotz tend to neutralize the slight advantage.

b) Orks can overwhelm an opponent just by mass garrisoning. It's hard to use hit-and-run tactics when the orks can start a majority of their army within a double move of most of the board.

c) Orks can have large, cheap formations and also rally quite easily. This means that even if you can manage to break a formation in an assault, that formation will most likely be ready to fight the next turn. Meanwhile, Eldar formations get worn down and unable to cope with BMs due to shooting.

That said, it seems like beefed up guardian formations can hold their own most of the time, but those get expensive pretty fast. It seems like an all-infantry ork army has very distinct advantages, and those advantages work against the Eldar weaknesses.

Eldar should really have an activation advantage over Orks, and can use Windriders to devastating effect when timed properly.

Ignore the Gargants, gut the Skorcha Brigades with Falcons and force the Zzap Brigades to hide, this will win the armour duel. Rely on Firestorms to decimate the Fighta-Bommers, they are quite capable of dealing with large numbers of aircraft, unlike SM Hunters.

I´ve never felt ork infantry to be much of a problem, I use Windriders to assault and these are easily fast enough to hit a formations flank, avoiding most of the Grotz.

Garrisons are just first-turn-targets for Nightspinners, having artillery is a must vs. Orks to prevent bunching up.

And then, as always with ELdar, there is the Warlock Titan. Orks are quite ill-equipped to deal with one, and especially when working in a combined arms environment, a Warlock can turn or even annhilate a flank.

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Individually, Eldar formations are fairly weak. However, when you can get several formations together assaulting & supporting against a single target, they are brutal. The great strength of the Eldar is the post assault consolidation move, which allows a single formation to engage one target and support the assaults on several others. So the trick is to set up a guaranteed assault to start with. Combined with the second retain in the right circumstances it can be vicious.  

As Orks are slow moving, Eldar can use their extra speed to pick where and when to fight. Pick a particular formation to engage, prep it and consolidate to support the next assault. I remember one battle against Orks where I was able to set up a domino effect using several formations of Jetbikes (Windriders), Storm Serpents with Guardians and falcons to Assault & support engagements across the front of an entire Ork army, breaking formation after formation. In two or three Eldar initiatives (5-7 assaults), I had broken over half the Ork army and wiped out several of the smaller formations.

However, that particular battle did occur in the days before the loss of Spirit Stones. Now Eldar are particularly susceptible to BMs, so must be carefully hidden until the right moment.

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Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

a) You really need to use terrain to hide behind, move-shoot-move back into cover. With Skimmer letting you go over any terrain you want and the fast move on most eldar tanks, you can often stay out of line of sight of the orks, even on a double. Grotz are like power shields: it feels like a waste of shots, but the sooner you start on them the sooner you can start whittling down the warbands.

I know it's hard to stay in cover, and there is often the temptation to take advance orders instead (to avoid the -1 to shooting), but going toe to toe with orks (or anyone, for that matter) is suicide. The key thing is that you are getting bad shots at them, they are getting none at you.

b)How big is your board? Swamping you with garrisons is one thing orks are very good at, but if you're starting behind terrain near the back line they shouldn't be able to get to you. That gives you one free turn of pounding them - hopefully you can smash whoever is the biggest threat in that turn.

c)If you can break them in an engagement, hammer them with artillery (you get about 2 kills per hit).

Edit to add: forget that bit about hitting them with artillery when broken - hit them with everything. If you can win an engage (clipping! - easy to do with eldar) on an already broken warband, they're gone!

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I have been away on business.

I am the guy who posted on Bols.  As I mentioned we have been having terrible problems with game balance, and find that no matter what combinations we try (we have marines, orks, eldar and guard) usually by turn 3-4 at the latest one army is badly busted and it is clear that they are going to lose.  Marines wiped out everything except the orks if they used landing craft, thunderhawks and teleporting terminators, and the orks have been completely undefeated.

We are by no means veteran Epic players, having played about 15-20 games in total between the 4 armies.  Certainly one of the earlier posters who mentioned that the focus has been more on shooting than assaults is correct.  The focus has mostly been around shooting, and maybe we have not setup the boards well enough to provide the cover needed to get close.

What I was hoping for was a few suggestions for scenarios we can use that will allow us to fight some battles that don't seem to be over 20 minutes after they start.

DustDevil

are you in Reading UK. If so I'm not a million miles from you in west Surrey. If you like I can demonstrate how to demolish orks with space marines sometime!

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[url=http://tinyurl.com/bott2015][img]http://i62.tinypic.com/205fcow.jpg[/img][/url]

. . . or indeed, you might persuade the all-conquering Orks to come along to Full Scale Assault - 2009. . .

Details here

_________________
"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

I´m not sure whether scenarios will help you as these are more difficult to balance than tournament-style games with forces of equal size over a (more or less) standard board.

The very aim of the tournament lists is to provide for a fair&balanced games, and, speaking for myself of course, I think the standard GT scenario and the official&amended lists do so pretty well.

Which leads me to the conclusion that you must be doing something wrong!


Since there are plenty of battle reports on this board, there should be a wealth of experience waiting to be tapped in there. Orks can be nasty, yes, but all armies are deadly if handled correctly. I´ve played Black Legion, Lost&Damned, Orks, Orkamedies Gargant Big Mob, Ulthwé, Biel-Tan and Saim-Hann Eldar, Tau and Space Marines, and they all can play to win, against all comers. Yes, some army builds can and do struggle vs. certain others, but I´ve never, ever, felt that I had no chance at all or had a game ending in total defeat after 20 minutes. Sometimes the dice hate you and make your day miserable, but E:A is a fine tactical game where luck is a factor, but rarely decisive.
Maneuver and combined arms are.

Anyway, I´d suggest trying something like placing lots of cover, at least the 12 pieces suggested (and pieces is not single building or a lone tree!), for example try to make sure that 80% of the line of sight from one deployment zone to the other is blocked, and that there is plenty of good infantry cover in the centre. Maneuver warfare requires something to maneuver around or behind after all.

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If you're not doing assaults, you're missing one of the most efficient ways of tearing up large formations -- clip the edge of an orc unit, or firefight it, perhaps with no hand to hand.  The goal is to rack up significant assault resolution modifiers so that the orcs are taking large 'hack-down' losses from losing and assault.

Also, look for ways to wipe out broken formations (e.g. by retaining for a second assault on a losing formation, or by cutting retreat routes.)

If you ever get a chance to play ASL/SL (Squad Leader) or other boardgames, you'll find these tactics and habits extremely useful.