What a crazy trip this has been.
Most of this writing has been on my holidays off work, where I can focus on it and sticking together all the new ogre stuff I bought. I've got a wonderful Thundertusk now that's trying it's damned hardest to stick to the base. The rest of my time has been writing this, playing Space Marine or eating or sleeping.
Ogres as a whole are an aggressive army, which favour taking a proactive approach of charging the enemy. They have a large amount of attacks in combat and have a good magic phase to back them up, used by tough wizards who can hold their own compared to anything less than a chaos sorcerer. Ogres also have decent shooting, large monsters, heavy hitting cavalry and the options for lots of models or very few. On top of this, their heroes and lords can cause hell and get to some wickedly high damage potential.
They of course have their weaknesses. They will hurt you in close combat but have low initiative, which doesn't help when enemies get spells that prey on this. On top of that, multiple wounds hurt them more than any other army, but they have some methods to deal with warmachines in the form of faster units, specialised maneaters, gorgers or shooting them back.
These strengths and weaknesses ofset each other and help them to be quite a balanced army. You can have a lot of fun picking how your army works and it'll still run well enough for you to do what you cane to do. In most cases, this is carve a path of bloody death through the enemies ranks and eat the fallen.
To go over their main army strengths and weaknesses: Ogres are a close combat army that win combat using a mixture of volume of attacks and support attacks, being very tough and durable per model and benefiting from charging heavily. They have decent shooting via the specials and rare slots. They play aggressively and favour an in-your-face style gameplay, which is boosted by their magic. Ogre Wizards aren't shabby at all, with their greatest selling point being the ability to actually want them in melee and being able to deck enemy wizards in the face. The Lore of the Great Maw isn't too shabby either, supporting your troops with offense and defensive buffs with a few damage spells here and there. Depending on your choice of specials, rares and heroes your army can vary widely, and allows you to really cherry pick what suits you best. Most people also forget that Ogres are actually quite fast, with only Gnoblars being M4 compared to 6+ for the rest of your army.
The downsides are the low model count and initiative value. Both of these mean that 'initiative tests or removed' such as the Purple Sun will rip straight through you. Ogres hate multiple wounds with a passion so warmachines have a field day destroying your movement trays full of fat and muscle. They aren't going to be the best shooters but it's an element to support you getting into combat. On top of that, you're not a high leadership army. These are offput by several abilities to deal with such weaknesses: Warmachines can be singled and hunted out (with lone sabertusks, ironblasters, maneaters and your own spellcasting), whilst wizards can also have methods of being dealt with (lone sabertusks, hellheart, your own counter magic and maneaters). To make an Ogre army, you must offset these weaknesses, the leadership one being as easy as a tyrant or slaughtermaster with a Battle Standard and the latter requiring either some cunning and good placement, or changing parts of your list to help out.
As an Ogre player, I've greatly enjoyed this new update and hope that you all took this little series well. Of all things, I try not to say whether something is good, great or the best, simply tell you my general feelings and let you make your own decision. Enjoy the new figures at least, have a good one.
Also, I post here now. Hi.
