I won the roll but gave up first turn. In retrospect I am not sure if that was correct against this particular army. I set up my Wolf Scouts in an infiltrated line as you can see. The deployment was diagonal similar to an Apocalypse deployment, except that the angle was fixed. The Wolf Scouts do a nice job of showing the deployment line, and we deployed 12" on either side of that.
If I had gone first my Wolf Scouts could have probably wrecked a few of his transports right off the get-go. As it stood my plan was to use them to choke up midfield and keep his Truks from zooming into my face. I hoped that I might even be able to get his boyz to assault them out in the open and get stuck out there for me to shoot and counter-assault. My Fenrisien Wolf unit with attached Wolf Lord was at the front of my deployment line ready to accomplish this.
My opponent did move up and assault the Scouts, and both squads he used did end up stuck in the open. However, my Fenrisien Buzzsaw which combi-assaulted his two squads really whiffed badly. They could have used Logan's support to buff up their attacks, and if my Wolf Scouts had been closer to my lines I could have used some Wolf Guard to support that attack as well. As it was, my buzzsaw got stuck in combat (actually lost combat IIRC), got counter-assaulted by a Killa Kan and some other boyz, and just generally got bogged down.
I should have dropped Logan right into midfield, immediately behind the scrimmage line. I didn't need melta-range to accomplish what I needed to accomplish, and then the Rune Priest could have murderous hurricaned the large foot Boyz Squad on the right and slowed them down. Instead, I made a bad call and dropped Logan and company into my opponent's backfield, blew up his Battlewagon and wiffed horribly with my anti-infantry shooting (murderous hurricane got 4 hits off) against his Lootaz (which weren't really the grave threat).
All in all, it was just a series of bad-calls compounded by poor rolling. From here he was essentially able to just start rolling over my Wolf Guard units piecemeal, brought in his outflanking buzzsaw deffkoptas to take on one of my Longfang squads, brought in Snikrot to take out the other, and just generally did what his army does once you let it get going.
Logan did redeem himself a bit by destroying an entire Meganob squad and Ghazkull by himself, but them lost his last wound charging into cover against an eight man Loota squad. Yes, really. I rolled "ones" for Terminator saves like it was my job.
I think that in the grand scheme, my dice were "average" and I needed them to be "above average" to pull a better outcome from poor decisions. Hopefully the picture above helps illustrate what I mean.
I just have to observe, Ghazkull adds a big "oh shit" factor to the army. Ork Boyz that move like Assault Marines, or that have charge ranges out of vehicles of (12 +2 + 1 + 6 + 6) 27 inches is just... intimidating. Again, Orks intimidate me because I don't fully understand what they can do and I don't have a lot of experience fighting them.
My opponent was a real pleasure to play against though, and I appreciated the learning experience. I hope he becomes a reader here and can share more about his experiences with Orks. He clearly knows what he's doing.
