Ogre Kingdoms Tactics: To Horde or not to Horde

Hey guys, time to get back to talking about our porcine monsters, the Ogres!  I played a game last weekend with them against my friend's Tomb Kings, trying out a horde of 16 Ironguts with Slaughtermaster and BSB.  While I did manage to pull off a victory, I can't help but think about how lucky I got.

To Horde

When playing an army like ogres, you always get a high concentration of attacks in a relatively narrow frontage.  To maximize that, adding another rank of attacks pushes you up to a lovely 9 attacks per 40mm in the front, compared to regular A1 20mm models, who will get 6, 8 if they're spearmen.  Also, when running a horde formation of Ogres, it means you have fewer units that you need to cast buffs on, effectively making your magic more potent.

A horde of Ironguts is going to dish out 54 attacks at S6, there isn't a unit in the game that wants to face that kind of punishment.  Even if you go last you're only probably going to lose 1-2 ogres, which still means you're going to dish out the pain.  If you're like me and run a Thundertusk along side, you might even be lucky enough to not lose any models before you get a chance to strike!

So with these great reasons to run the Ogre Horde, why would you ever not want to?

Not to Horde

Maneuverability.  A Horde of Ironguts is going to be 240mm wide, or about 9.5", which makes it a royal nightmare to maneuver around buildings and other impassible terrain, as well as terrain you just don't want to be in, like Blood Forests, Boiling Floods, Mist Wreathed Swamps, etc.  Also, with that wide of a unit, wheeling is much less efficient than on a unit that is half the width.  A smart opponent can use this to their advantage and make it nearly impossible for you to get around to a good fight where you get to bring all your attacks to bear.

The other big reason I ran into playing with the Ogre Horde was the fact that it's very susceptible to a multi-charge.  I was fortunate that my opponent wasn't able to pull it off, but I was extremely open at one point to taking a unit of flaming chariot attacks in the flank, as well as a Tomb Guard horde to my front.  Had they both landed at the same time, it would have been over, fortunately however he failed the TG charge and I was able to dismantle the chariots and Tomb Guard at my leisure.

Conclusion

In the end, while it was fun to play the horde, it was just not very maneuverable and difficult to protect from multi-assaults, I think that my 2 units of 8 for my main blocks worked better in most of my other games.  I may play it every now and then for fun, but as far as a reliable option goes, I prefer the flexibility of two units.