There are fears that Orks will have too few players to make an impact in the campaign and having hordes of Orks to face off against is what is supposed to happen in 40k. But the way things are looking this is a possibility of not happening often.

I propose making the orks very unique for players in the following manner.

Using an Ork shoota/grunt class for example and the numbers used are just for illustration purposes and not what play-tested fairness should be.

The ork player's character is a squad of orks

The player controls all the movement and moves of one single ork, and the squad is acts like a bodyguard unit.

Say the squad has 200 health, divide that health among 20 ork models.
The player controls specifically 1 ork at the front facing of the squad.

If the ork the player controls gets killed, the player takes control of the next nearest ork to the first one it was controlling.

Whenever the player turns around, all the orks in his untit move out of the way for the player to see and shoot easy.

When the player regens health he instead replenishes squad mates, they re-spawn at the back of the group.

The player controls and moves the one ork like normal, the rest attack if enemies are nearby, move along the player and retreat if the player runs off.

The squad would be able to shoot through each other in the general direction of what the player is shooting at. This could be balanced because even if there is like 20 guns shooting at 1 target, it's Ork shooting.

AI ork would act (lore wise) close to what is expected of them. They just have to follow the leader and swing when they can.

I think this would make the Orks very interesting to play and increase thier appeal. And would make it pretty fun for one side to have a very target rich environment and fit with the lore of 40k. And if there was few ork players this would balance numbers out. And the squad could be inflated if the ork players get to be too few.

Now as far as hero/elite classes would be different, but for the common classes this would be interesting.

I would really love to be able to law waste to huge numbers of orks in battle, but there needs to be HORDES of orks to kill in the first place.

If the server could read what you suggest, after the first line would say "screw you guys, i'm going to home!"

20 Orks per player? Damn that is quite a number of NPC per battle for a PVP game

This kind of idea is usually suggested for Imperial Guard's gameplay, like playing the Sarge in a 5 IG squad. You system seems well though on the paper, it is funny to imagine and must be great to play but as I recall the big disadvantage is it's quite expensive server-ressources wise.

You do realize that with your system it goes up to 2000 models for only 100 players, right? That's hell of a lot of AI to manage, even with only a "simple" behaviour. Reducing the number of NPCs could be a step forward, but even like this I think the games would be too hard to handle. Moreover with Pikkoserver technology, people will come for everywhere around the world to fight in the same field, and maybe the latency will complicate the AI management. Wait and see.

We will surely have NPCs to prevent ghost capping in bases, standing as a garrison to defend outposts or strategical points. But having many more of them on the battlefield with a lot of players (like a thousand) playing at the same time is harder to handle than a battlefield with only players fighting in.

However I do agree that we need to face hordes and hordes of Orks to feel the true W40K spirit, but I trust the F2Waaaaagh offer, and the fact that for free the Ork faction is near to completely unlocked.

The 20 orks was just a number out of my head to get an idea, since we don't know much about what the computer could do or how hard the orks are to kill, but like maybe 5-7 orks .
I just pulled the numbers out of my head for an example, because I have never played the game yet or know what it is capable of. Since there is so much I don't know, I can only give a general idea and concept.

I would love the absolute chaos this creates in game though.

Chaos ain't always a good thing mate (but don't tell the heretics). Wait and see till we have more about NPCs in game ^^

People have proposed this for IG implementation and it wouldn't work. Please at least look around the sub-forum or forums before you post.

I've been here for, like, a bit more than half a year now, and it just get tiresome to hear the same damn ideas again and again without regard for what is practically possible...

At least the "Female Space Marine" thread isn't getting remade all the time - I'd imagine that could make me quit the forums...

To fix the "Ork horde issue" i was thinking that f2p peoples can still play as an ork boy, but get a teensy bit of another classes' wargear, for example a boy with a big shoota or rokkit launcha.

However said boy may not necessarily have to be a tankbusta to get the rokkit launcha.

I think - THINK - the usual Boy will have access to most of the usual stuff we know from the TT, like Rokkits and Bog Shootas, but there might be more stuff. The devs would properbly make a lot of new stuff for the game that we don't know of too, so...

Yo dawg! I heard you like using rokkit launcha without being a tankbuzta. So we gave a rokkit launcha to your boy without it being a tankbuzta!

;/