Monday 27 January 2014

Koraga Conclusion


Today we're going to move on with our Koraga review after my weekend off. Things are getting a bit busy, so we'll have to see about keeping up a 6 day schedule. At any rate, I'm slowly catching up, and should be done another ship by the end of the week. We're going to look at some of the other upgrades that came with the Koraga package.

EM Pulse (Klingon/I.K.S. Koraga Expansion)
Action: Disable this card to target a ship at Range 1-2. The target ship rolls 1 less attack die and 1 less defense die this round.
Cost: 4


First up, the EM Pulse. In comparison to the Ferengi EM Pulse, which has the same range band and also costs an action, this is VERY underpowered. The ability to throw an auxiliary power token onto a ship that hasn't moved yet- that may be about to undertake a red maneuver- is very strong. Sure, it'll 99% of the time not work that way, but the threat alone- and the MANIPULATION of that threat- should get you a lot of mileage out of that 4 point upgrade. The manipulation of that threat is going to be where the rubber meets the road, so if you're just learning the ropes of attack wing, this is probably not the strategy for you (I don't even know if I'm there yet, to be honest).

The Klingon EM Pulse is all of the headache, none of the fun. If you're targeting the ship with a barrage of fire, or with a combined arms strategy, sure, the EM Pulse can get you some mileage, but it's very middle of the road. I've never run it, and I don't think it's particularly good. If you put it into an optimized Klingon Attack Build, sure, it can probably do some damage- but you're winning because of the awesome Klingon ships, not because you pulsed someone.

Moving on,

... oh wait...

There's nothing left! I forgot that all that was left in the package was the Pulse and the Photon Torpedoes.

To be honest, the Koraga is a bit of a mixed bag. I think it's a great buy, but I would have rather THIS be the LE prize instead of the Ch'Tang. The Ch'Tang is just leaps and bounds better than the Koraga. There aren't going to be many instances where I would want a named Koraga over a Ch'Tang. There are a few standouts- a second drex, Alexander, the Koraga itself, but the Captains and the rest is the usual Klingon stuff. Going into a Klingon expansion at this point, is to tread familiar ground. There's a great ship, some mediocre upgrades, and that's about it. Klingons don't really break out of their mold, which is a good thing at this point. I'd like to have a bird of prey swarm be a viable build at some point in the future, but we're probably going to be waiting for about a year. The bird of prey model is, in my opinion, a license to print money, so I would expect to see multiple versions of this thing get released as the game continues. We haven't seen the last of this sculpt!

4 comments:

  1. I've experimented with the (identical) Dominion EM Pulse and found it fairly useless. The fact that it debuffs both defense and offense and doesn't have the Ferengi version's "not front arc" restrictriction are minor good points, but at 4 points it still isn't good enough to worth using. The penalties do stack and you could theoretically apply crippling debuffs by using two or three EMPs, but that's the actions off multiple ships which could have been doing something more offensive. If it dropped AuxPower then yes, using them would be totally worth investing in three of them and any trick you could find to allow them to re-enable faster - but they don't.

    Which is probably a good thing, really. The game doesn't need fleets of Romulan Science Vessels with EMPs preventing you from taking actions or making red maneuvers most of the time.

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  2. The Koraga is a far better ship than the Ch'tang. The cards in the Ch'tang might be overall better, but the Koraga is the much better ship. 4 attack & 5 hull will live a lot longer than 4 attack 3 hull. And Worf is a better Captain than Martok9, if only because the Klingons already had a high skill Captain (Martok8) and a +1 boosting ability in Gowron. That reroll all blanks w/o a Target Lock ability of Worf is amazing. I'm glad the Koraga is available for everyone and not the Ch'tang, even with all the people that (wrongly) think Barrage of Fire is the most broken and amazing card ever.

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    1. The Ch'tang isn't as important as the generic B'rel. If those were available as general release ships, the Klingons would have a much better option for 4-ship swarm fleets than they do currently. The generic K'vort isn't anything to write home about - it sits at an inconvenient price point, too expensive to work well in a swarm, and a little too weak to work well in a traditional 3-ship force, at least when it's forced to compete with the Vor'cha class.

      Worf's pretty good but not flawless. He fires kind of late in the turn against many popular builds, and he's so good on offense that he tends to draw enough fire to die early a lot of the time. Same problem the Ch'tang has, really - so dangerous they make priority targets. Definitely does not belong on anything with less than 5 hull, and 6+ is better. Conveniently, he is right at home on the whatever you've upgraded to flagship, since his text works fine there - other ships will be converting a blank to a hit with each shot, and Worf will be rerolling all of his and riding a much tougher ship, which is optimal synergy. Doesn't fix the late-firing problem, but you can't have everything.

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  3. Do not agree that the Koraga is better than the Ch'Tang. The named ability on the Ch'Tang is so much better than the one on the Koraga. Re: Koraga, for two more points, get yourself the superior Vorcha. The Ch'Tang is a beast for the points.

    And Barrage of Fire is mostly meh. I agree with you there!

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