Romulans at the moment

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:02 am

IMO the Romulans need some love right now.

The way it's now they basically don't have a real early game unit, with rhienns being terribly overpriced for their forward firing pulse weapons and their squishiness. Phase armor sounds nice, don't think it will make alot of difference. For one I think the rhienn is very overpriced, I mean V-13 is just over 100 dillithium over it, and the difference is , well obvious.
For one thing I think most of their ships cost more than they offer in return, the warbird line being 1k+ for the ones you'll actually use, dderix and norexan.

Also as I've learned recently, a clear counter to Borg does not exist, need more torpedos at spam price. If you try Rommie vs. Borg endgame, you'll feel chronically undergunned, strugling to bring one ship down with your fleet falling, ship at the time. A funny example was leaving 16 norexans with MPW on and without support against a tact cube. Cube pwned with as little as a scratch after the battle.
Again WTB breen cruiser for the Rommies

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:24 am

Hmm you have a  point although the Rhienn in my opinion is amazing. Fast, agile, long range weapons. Worth the price. Saying that. there's not much of an option; then again is there for any race?

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:30 am

Well think about that ...

 Norexans are almost completely Pulse-battleships and are going to only do 60% damage to the Cube.  D'Deridex are far more useful against a Cube because they do in fact have torpedoes and beams.

  Also ... why are your Norexans going in unsupported?  The whole idea behind Romulans is that you HAVE to support your battleships.  That cube would never have fired a shot if you had just used a couple of support refits constantly shooting off plasma bolts ...  If you used D'Deridex's to back up a couple Norexans, with Generix Supports, Rhienn Torpedoes, and a good number of Leahvals you'd had no trouble at all.

  Yes they are very expensive, but they also have a 2 second cloaking device.   Cloak Detect is very hard to use effectively right now so the idea is that you need to put pressure on your opponent constantly with hit and run attacks, ambushes, and picking off stray units whenever possible.  There is a reason why things are different than the other factions.

  The Rommies did just get an overall price reduction, and some new things to help them out a bit early game.  I don't know if you are playing against the AI or online, but since I don't know you on Wippien I'm going to guess that you are an AI player.

 That's fine, but before you go asking them to make Romulans so much more powerful I really suggest you try and play some humans.  Humans can't cheat and the actual tactics you employ will show up with much greater effect than if you just play the AI.  The AI is essentially:

[Build enough ships to kill the endless wave of enemies that come at you without losing too many]

 Harassing mining is pointless because the AI never really runs out of resources ...


Ninja'ed by Proton.  By I have to say that the Rhienn is neither fast nor agile.  I don't know if I will say they are worth the price but the phase armor really does help them out in some situations.

[Jamess14]

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:37 am

Last edited by Jamess14 on January 20th, 2010, 7:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well as I said they were unssupported because unfortunately my fleet got separated and the generixes, support and spectre were figthing spheres on the other side of my base. And yes if we talk about shutting down one cube it's easy. But I don't see just one cube going in without support of assims and spheres, as it never does. And the sheer amount of micro needed to keep support generixes on low weapon auto and then chain disable and recharge shield that go down instantly against the cube is..staggering. Atleast for me
P.S. Not to mention doing it against a fleet. The thing is that with rommies you have alot of small ships in borg matchups, trying to find a support to disable among the spectre refits and at the same time trying to charge shields against multiple spheres, assims, a diamond and a cube is way beyond me:)

Your right about the stealth being a great boon and the coolest feature(why most of us play rommies..cool feel) but once sh**t hits the fan, stealth can't help you much:) As in fleet skirmishes or siege of a base.. also mostly trying to cloak while in combat against the borg always felt like auto destruct button:)
How do you feel with rommies atm?

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:46 am

Haha well you're not alone there.  Micro-ing the supports in tough shit indeed, but you don't have to keep it's weapons off ALL the time.  Even if they go off for 4 seconds and there's a 2 second gap before you get the second one off, that 2/3 of the weapon damage it could have been doing GONE completely.  Makes a big difference!

  Sound like you were playing the AI.  It cheats.  Unfortunately with Romulans right now I really don't have a good solution for you.  The AI cheats and puts out more ships than you're sometimes able to destroy.  Especially with Romulans who sometimes lack the raw firepower the Feds or Klingons can muster at one time.

  It's all about a mixed fleet taking on the Borg!  If you're Mijural try using hte Cehlear's Disruptor Bombard.  It will render that vessel completely harmless for a bit while you pound on it.  If you're Helev then you .... well I'm not so good with the smaller Rommies vessels .

  Also the Tavara fully upgraded is a monster and while it can't quite go toe-to-toe with a Cube, it's more than a match for one if it's got some backup.

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:47 am

The Rhienn Band-Aid, a.k.a. Phase Plates, is actually quite good against short ranged units like the b'rel.  Normally, the brel does 7.5 damage (from the odf file), but it only does 1.5 damage to a phase plated Rhienn.  Plus the special effect looks cool.

I'm sad about the cost hikes too.   But pretty much all the battleships from all races got one, so I'm kind of reserving judgement until I can test some more.  Now that Romulans in theory have a chance now in mulitplayer, we can figure out how they stack up against the others.

Boggz got in before me.

I think what he's saying Boggz, is that on two moon pairs you can only keep up producing battleships (i.e., building ships from one yard only) while the other races can produce from 2.  Now, I'm not saying that Rom battleships aren't powerful and that everything could be balanced, but you can't build support ships from the staryard and produce battleships at the same time.  It has to be one or the other.  And if you do it that way, you don't have many battleships to make the difference that you want.  And from the first glance that I saw (and from the changelog), the price reduction was in research.  Rhienns stayed the same, I'll have to check the other vessels to be sure.  The techtree remained unchanged.  But again, more testing is needed to be sure, since 3.1.1 Emergency only came out today.

And did you just say "play some humans", especially in light of current events?  

[Jamess14]

posted on January 20th, 2010, 7:54 am

Last edited by Jamess14 on January 20th, 2010, 8:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

I didnt quite get what you meant about microing supports. I think a nice solution would be if you had more of them in a group and pressed the torpedo button only one of them(the closest for instance) fired and not all. If I keep them on high weap. then it's just everyone fire's off a torp and plant a bunch of mines and I'm left trying to keep my as* together

One thing off topic tho: If a ship or it's systems are advantageous against a certain range of weapons does it mean that it's against weapons declared of that range like short, medium and long or is that against any weapon if it comes in like short weapon range?

posted on January 20th, 2010, 8:35 am

And did you just say "play some humans", especially in light of current events?  

  Something like that. 

  I was just saying that since each of the Factions has it's own "theme" if you will that encourages it to play a certain way, they will perform differently against the AI than they will against a human.  The Rom playstyle is less conducive to AI matches (I think) because of the slow production and high costs making the endless waves of free AI ships be more difficult. 

  So basically I wanted to point out that while the Rommies may still be the weakest faction against a Borg AI  , they are starting to gain footing in Online play.

Or should I be burned at the stake for that observation?  >:D

[tom]

posted on January 20th, 2010, 8:41 am

Last edited by tom on January 20th, 2010, 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

I didnt quite get what you meant about microing supports. I think a nice solution would be if you had more of them in a group and pressed the torpedo button only one of them(the closest for instance) fired and not all. If I keep them on high weap. then it's just everyone fire's off a torp and plant a bunch of mines and I'm left trying to keep my as* together

i don tlike the idea. what about shield recharge: only one or all... and so on with other abilities. no point in making things more complex then they r.

micro is a part of rts games, if u take it away u have turn-based. one why to improve FO would be special abilities keyboard shortcuts. God (Doca/Optec) please, at least for the cloak, please, its so frustrating to click them

EDIT: and collision, even more important

posted on January 20th, 2010, 8:49 am

micro is a part of rts games, if u take it away u have turn-based. one why to improve FO would be special abilities keyboard shortcuts. God (Doca/Optec) please, at least for the cloak, please, its so frustrating to click them

i see your point, however it is as good as impossible to have an hotkey for every special weapon that exists, as there are so many. cloak may be a good point, i will put up a todo for it.

posted on January 20th, 2010, 9:01 am

A hotkey for collision would be nice indeed.  Things just happen to fast sometimes for my 85% chance to smack a vessel.

Or should I be burned at the stake for that observation? 

I would burn you at the stake regardless.

posted on January 20th, 2010, 9:04 am

I agree that there are a few hotkeys for abilities that are intended for the direst of situations-

i.e.

Cloak

Collision

More escape me ...

posted on January 20th, 2010, 9:06 am

i see your point, however it is as good as impossible to have an hotkey for every special weapon that exists, as there are so many. cloak may be a good point, i will put up a todo for it.

i know im a cheap truck driver bitch for bringing it up again but every rts i played online except FO has shortcuts for all actions, mouse is only used to point the location, almost never to select action type. usually they r context specific so 'c' for the bug would be collision but 'c' for rom/kling ships would be cloak. i dont know if its possible in FO.

anyway collision and cloak would be excellent to have.

posted on January 20th, 2010, 10:09 am

i dont know if its possible in FO.

At least it should be, since Armada-II and FO support shortcuts at all.

[Jamess14]

posted on January 20th, 2010, 10:53 am

Last edited by Jamess14 on January 20th, 2010, 11:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

The shortcuts should be done if possible like in A2. The F 1-12 keys. The first ability is always F1 and all the following are F2,F3... That would save you time, and you don't have to be creative about it. I think the only exception should be cloak at 'c'.

EDIT...forgot what happens when you group things together:)