The new basic game mechanics, like profiles and the way weapons work, are shared among all factions, so you will also identify Offensive, Defensive, Allround and Support vessels when playing the Empire for the first time. Yet the actual gameplay is very different from the Federation. While a Federation player spends a good portion of his or her time with fleet management, grouping synergies and advancing in the tech tree, a Romulan player is busy with quite different things.

A key gameplay element of the Romulans is countering. The Star Empire offers efficient and very specialized and dedicated warships, usually superior in certain situations. To exploit these benefits, a Romulan player will spend a good portion of his or her time in gathering scouting information from opponents, in order to adjust strategies.

Yet, scouting alone is definitely not the true Romulan way. That's why a lot of new game mechanics - including a bunch of fresh vessels - come into play. While most faction try to overwhelm their enemy with building up a superior strategy, Romulans do it the other way around. They deny their opponent strategies with sabotage, false sensor reading, distractions and disabling. A Romulan player may sabotage hostile mining operations, or disrupt fleet movement, in order to shift the fate on the battlefield to situations where his or her dedicated vessels excel, making swift and deadly strikes to hunt down the scattered enemy ships or unprotected areas. One of the most prominent additions in the arsenal for this kind of task is a new Tal'Shiar command vessel, which will be portrayed in a separate news post.

Another thing you will definitely notice when switching from Federation to Romulan is the incredibly flat technology tree, allowing access to most of your vessels in no time. This leads to completely different gameplay for both the factions, which is one of the key goals we want to achieve in the faction redo. While the Federation is relatively fault tolerant with mixed fleets, teching and synergies, the Romulans strike with nasty special technologies, disturbance of strategies, mines and wait for their opponents to stumble into a carefully laid out trap to finish them off with a dagger.. ehm I mean a warbird.




This is just a rough introduction to the new Star Empire. Stay tuned as we post more about their specific new toys.
Cu next post!