Breakout Expansions: The Koranak

I remember a time right at the start of Star Trek: Attack Wing when the dominion were weak. They didn't get a ship in the starter set and their first five expansion (the Jem'Hadar attack ship, Gor Portas and Kraxon) didn't set the world (Universe) on fire.

Then came the Koronak and in one expansion they suddenly became a powerful faction. What was it that made the Koronak such a big deal? I thought I'd write some of my thoughts down to see if I could work it out.

Koronak 5-1-4-3

Instead of making a normal attack, you may spend a [SCAN] Token to attack 2 different ships with your Primary Weapon at -2 attack dice each.

The ship itself has a lot to do with the strength of the expansion. At the time only Klingons had 5 PWV ships, with both the Negh'var and Vor'cha. The cost with taking these though was that you couldn't get battle stations on the ship and so your dice quality relied upon Target Locking your opponent, which was not always possible with the then prevalence of Cloakers. The Koronak was good because it was the first ship that gave you 5 dice with BS. This meant that you could fire at cloaked ships with some quality and was the first time perhaps ever that cloak wasn't always the best option.

This was somewhat exacerbated by the inclusion in the pack of Gul Dukat. 

Dukat was only the second captain in the game that allowed his own ship to take a second action. Sure, Martok let another ship take an additional action but Dukat allowed your own ship to take the BS action (which seems to be what he chooses most often) and do something else at the same time, be it target lock, scan or re-enable on of the upgrades on your ship. At the time only federation had the additional action captain in Picard and the best attack he could get was 4 PWV on his own Enterprise-D. 

A further cherry was added in the shape of Boheeka.

Boheeka gave the Koronak even better dice quality and synergised oh so well with Dukat. With a five dice attack, Bs and Boheeka there was a pretty good chance that all of your dice would hit, making it the perfect ship to engage Cloakers. As you can probably tell, this is the ship that broke the cloaked fleet meta-game. 

In addition to these cards, the pack included a number of other useful if not overwhelmingly good cards -the dominion cloaking device, Gul Evek, tetryon emissions, and captured intelligence all boosted defence and made the dominion a faction, finally, to be reckoned with.

Ship Build ideas:

1. Offence

Koranak [Koranak] (26)

Gul Dukat [Koranak] (5)

Boheeka [Koranak] (2)

Total (33)

Fleet total: 33

2. Defence

Koranak [Koranak] (26)

Gul Evek [Koranak] (2)

Captured Intelligence [Koranak] (3)

Elim Garak [Deep Space 9] (4)

Tetryon Emissions [Koranak] (3)

Cloaking Device [Koranak] (4)

Total (42)

Fleet total: 42

Until next time,

D