My very first Ogre Kingdom's Battle

I am going to play my first battle with a friend on Thursday. He'll be playing maybe his 2nd battle using Wood Elves (he's a very experienced WHBFB player in general). The battle will be 1500 points.

It's a friendly game. As you may guess from the list, I am playing based on the models I have available. I hope to use a Tyrant as my leader by default. I wanted him to be hard to kill and while slow, he can crush anything with his six S8, WS6 attacks.  I am clearly lacking a BSB, purely because I don't have the model. The BSB is the next things I will add my army.

Other than that, any tips? I've never battled Wood Elves before in Warhammer, so I am not sure what to expect. i kind of expect them to die, because of what you read about Wood Elves on the web. My opponent is much craftier than I am, though, and it is my first time with Ogres, so I am probably wrong.

Here's the list:

Tyrant (322)
Heavy Armor, Great Weapon (+2S), Trickster's Helm, Giant Breaker (+1S), Club of Battle (+1A)

Firebelly (180)
Lvl 2, Dispel Scroll

6 Ogres (254)
Crusher, Bellower, Standard. Iron Fists.

6 Iron Guts (338)
Gutlord, Bellower, Standard.  Iron Fists. Dragon Banner.

4 Lead Belchers (172)

3 Sabertusks (63)

Iron Blaster (170)

Hello and welcome to the Stronghold! I'll start by saying that this is best suited for the "armies of the stronghold" section. Maybe a mod can move it for you so people will find it.

On to your list, load-out, and tactics.
Luckily you don't really need a BSB until you go past 1,500pts as long as you deploy correctly. If you put your Tyrant with your ogres and give your Ironguts the standard of discipline instead of the dragonhide banner both units will have a fairly high LD if they get seperated. Now as for your Tyrant's loadout I have quite a few suggestions for you. Drop the giant breaker as having a Great Weapon already gives you Strength 7 so thats -4 to armor saves and can deal with high toughness targets. I'm also fairly certain the club of battle and great weapon can't be taken together as it's technically two different weapons. So with those two items gone you now have points to put some armor and a ward save on him so he might actually....survive to strike last, you know?

Ironguts can't take ironfists, they only have greatweapons. Maybe a bellower on the leadbelchers?
Not much more I can say as you don't have any more models.

As for tactics, run the three sabretusks as three units of one. Wood Elf players normally take a bunch of small units of archers and will shoot up your two main combat units until they are ineffective in combat. The leadbelchers can easily clear up small units of elves and whatever chaff they throw at you. Use the tusks to tie up units that will shoot up your main blocks. Your firebelly will be great for taking out dyrads or treeman with his fireball(take the fireball no matter what). Put your ogre and irongut units after which elf units hold his general, BSB, or spell caster....that's probably where you'll get most of your points(and once your units are in combat he can't keep shooting at them).

Best of luck,

-GL

Thanks! I'm taking your advice on the Tyrant. I replaced the two things you mentioned with the Talisman of Preservation, so now he's rockin' a 4+ ward save as well as the trickster's helm. I kind of want to try the Dragonhide Banner, so I'm going to keep that in for now. I'll post a report here to let you know how it goes.

My first Battle with the Ogres was fun. It was a 1500 point game against Wood Elves. It was a small game so we played on a 4x4 board, deploying from the corners.

We were both trying new armies, and my opponent had a ton of proxied models (Brettonians and Skaven) because the Wood Elf Batallion is no longer on sale from GW (hmmm...).

The Wood elves had three squads of Dryads, a unit of Treekin, two glade guard, some sort of light cavalry, an eagle, a prince on a monstrous beast, a level 4 wizard with lore of beasts and a BSB with magic now and arrows. It was a little confusing what was what because of all the proxying.

You can see my list in the original post on the topic.

I learned the dryads are quite tough! I killed them all but it took a toll, including chasing my Leadbelchers off the table. The prince on the other hand went down pretty easily.

I made several big mistakes:

• I had a Dragon Banner on my Ironguts which I forgot to use
• I forgot the Ironguts have great weapons
• I forgot to stomp one combat where it would have really changed things
• I never used the Firebelly's breath weapon.
• I forgot to shoot the iron blaster on  turn one.
• I wasted a couple of turns having my bulls chase light cavalry in my back field. They should have stuck with the big Irongut unit.

Despite all that victory was within reach until his wizard was able get off a spell to transform into Mountain Chimera  .  The next turn the winds of magic went snake eyes so I couldn't dispel it. Those things are insanely powerful, and it killed my tyrant dead, which killed my chances.

So it was a Wood Elf victory, but that is OK as I learned a lot. One of the challenges in this game is keeping track of all of the special rules and you should be using each phase of the turn in the midst of the excitement.

No photo of this report – I am ashamed of the unpainted  and in some cases partially assembled models.

I couldn't agree more, all of the special rules are tough to remember.  Especially stuff like the ironcurse icon late in a game.  Specialty stuff that you don't use every turn.  I can't tell you how many times I have done that.  It gets easier the more you play with certain builds though.

Most important thing is to have fun with it.  Thanks for the quick writeup!

Ah, the fun of the start of the hobby

I've got a little over 30 games under my belt, and I still forget small details (especially the Firebelly's breath weapon... I always forget to use it!). At my last tournament, I forgot that I gave my two Wizards great weapons, so I was having them roll at initiative for Str4, which wasn't a terrible loss, but like 20 points I wasn't using

I'm glad you enjoyed the game, regardless of the outcome! Transformation of Kadon (the Mountain-Chimera spell) is a very difficult spell to get past if it goes off. Keep on testing the waters and figuring out what it is that you enjoy, and glad that you got a game in!

Ouch...those are some big things too forget and would have surely helped you during the game. Always try to model your Ogres with what they have equipped(wysiwyg) that was you just look at them in order to remember what they have. It'll get easier with time though, best of luck.

P.S. Unless he took no command for any of those units or no magic items on characters while taking the minimum unit sizes for the units then he had over 1,500pts. Proxy-ing makes it difficult to tell though.

-GL