Deck 5 Opening Salvo - Piorun and Sultanhisar

Hi everyone,

Development of the 5th Forumini card deck is approaching completion so I hope to be bringing you card previews on a more regular basis from now on. To start us off we have a couple of every fleet's work-horses: Destroyers. These two are from minor nations, but rest assured that each of the major seven fleets will be seeing at least one new Destroyer this deck.

First up we have the Polish Destroyer Piorun :

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As a development team pick for this deck, Piorun joins the existing 3 Polish WotC cards and follows Team Kraken's ORP Burza. Piorun's most famous exploit came during the hunt for the Bismarck. Together with the other Destroyers under Vian's command, she doggedly harried the Battleship the night before she was finally sunk - a risky proposition even in darkness, with one 15-inch shell coming within 20 yards of hitting Piorun.

We initially paired Shadow Battleship with Torpedo Charge, however our Playtest Team found that these didn't work particularly well together, so we opted to replace the former with Lay Smoke Screen (which she did do after that close-call with a 15-in shell!).

Note that a unit doesn't have to actually make a torpedo attack in order to make use of the Torpedo Charge movement (only have a valid target in range), making this a very useful combination of SAs when you consider the difficulties usually encountered in laying a smoke screen in the right place despite losing the initiative. Don't forget, the Torpedo Charge movement will happen *after* your opponent moves.

ORP Piorun has a class limit of 1.

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Another development team pick, Sultanhisar marks the introduction of Turkey into these decks - that's 20 nations now by my count! While Turkey of course remained neutral during WW2 (until the very final stages), she's a common topic for 'what-if' scenarios. Like Spain, her involvement might have made all the difference in the often finely-balanced Meditteranean theater.

As is typically the case when developing ships without an active war history to work with, the Development Team have based Sultanhisar's SA suite on the role she might typically have performed instead. Of course the inclusion of Close Escort prompts the question of whether this deck will also include something *for* her to escort, but I suspect most of you can likely guess the answer to that one! ;-)

Sultanhisar has a class limit of 2 (4 were ordered but Gayret and Muavanet were taken over by RN on completion as HMS Ithuriel & HMS Inconstant. Ithuriel was damaged beyond repair and Inconstant eventually returned to the Turkish March 1946).

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I know that the minor navies aren't to everyone's taste, so next week I'll be returning with a couple of aircraft for the major navies. They're actually the cards the rest of the team wanted to show but we've already previewed quite a few already considering they make up 20% of the deck.