I converted another giant
and added another shaman this one based on the necromancer model- i like it better:
So my list for the tournament was 20 savage orcs, 2 savage orc shaman, 1 orge butcher, 2 giants and 5 trolls. The tournament used the missions from the aos book and balanced via sudden death for armies with less models and laurels proportional to wounds. This actually worked really well, the fellow who brought an army of dragon ogres lost every game!
my list seemed pretty fair- I won one game, drew the second (on a single roll of a 4+ I'd have won grrr) won the third and lost the fourth placing 7/25. In each game I scored a respectable number of Laurels (VPs) although I am going to be making a few changes. As I said the game does have a tactical dimension but it revolves around tying units up, careful synergies and planning for the unpredictability of the priority rolls within the turn sequence. The game I drew I rolled very poorly for priority however careful positioning allowed me to tie up 4 units of fancy khornate infantry with 20 orcs in a long shieldwall. buffs from the shamans gave them a 4+ rerollable and FNP so the held for most of the game while my giants fought his bloodcrushers and characters. I'm still struggling with planning to compensate for loss of priority and that cost me the win as his light cav were able to sweep round and assassinate my characters for a draw.
Bearing in mind that I'd only played two games previously I'm pretty happy with my performance however I'll make some tweaks to the army for the next month i think.
for the first month of the campaign games are restricted to 30 models 0-3 heroes, 0-1 warmachine, 0-1 monster So I'll have to drop a giant for november at least. this seriously weakens the offensive power of the army which relies on buffed orcs as an anvil and the giants and trolls as a hammer. In order to compensate I'll adjust the force from a traditional shieldwall into a proper raiding party- 10 savage orc boar riders have the same number of wounds as my 20 warriors however they have +50% attacks. replacing the twenty with ten allows me to trigger sudden death win conditions against the standard 30 model list most people will bring. It also gives me a highly mobile army that should be able to pick and choose which parts of an enemy army to engage. With a single objective like kill x all that's needed for victory and with my army only losing one giant in exchange for these much easier objectives, major victories should be much easier.
I've converted the first five: