Spread Your Wings

[Optec]

posted on January 27th, 2012, 7:26 pm

Last edited by Optec on January 27th, 2012, 9:26 pm, edited 4 times in total.

After a series of Federation news posts - basically because the Federation is the first faction we started to redo for the new system - we will now talk a bit about another playable faction: the Romulan Star Empire.

Click here to read this article!

posted on January 27th, 2012, 7:45 pm

Sounds very cool!

I'm already more of a Romulan player, but somehow it never felt Romulan.

posted on January 27th, 2012, 7:46 pm

Interesting! I think the dagger is quite a fitting metaphor for the Romulans. They are nasty spys killing you from behind like honorless dogs.
I like the idea to stronger emphasize this Romulan core attribute in gameplay.

posted on January 27th, 2012, 7:48 pm

Sounds interesting for me as well. We'll see what comes up in the end...I don't want a glass cannon faction because that is frustrating rather than challenging...

[Tryptic]

posted on January 27th, 2012, 7:53 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on January 27th, 2012, 8:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

...

"Incredibly flat tech tree"

...

Hearing this makes me die inside a little bit.  I do hope they have other ways of improving their vessels, such as extensive refits and offense/defense upgrades, or else they'll be annihilated in late-game fights.  Sort of like they are now.

On the other hand, I guess if it's done correctly it should be okay, as their counters will be flexible.  I just ask that they be capable of scaling their fleets to match an enemy who techs up.

...

Okay the more I think about it, this could be really fun!  Better access to various ships, more time to focus on micromanagement.  Just please tell me they have more global off/def upgrades than the others, SOMETHING to help them stay cost effective.

posted on January 27th, 2012, 8:01 pm

sounds fun, can't wait to try out the new rom tech tree.

posted on January 27th, 2012, 8:06 pm

In a perfect world, enemies dont get up even close to teching!

But well, Romulans dont believe in perfect worlds, so they arranged an arsenal for situations, where more.. direct measures are required. If you have ever seen a Klingon armada blowing up in a plasma-mine-field, you know what i mean 

More about this and other features in future news posts

posted on January 27th, 2012, 9:15 pm

Wonderful to see how different each race will be. Hopefully when this is done the game will have more the feel of 5 different but balanced games jammed into one!   Keep up the good work!

[Tryptic]

posted on January 27th, 2012, 9:27 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on January 27th, 2012, 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for lockdown strategies.  In fact, they seem to be my best strategy, as I get easily confused by large forces and complex battlefields.  But a lockdown-based race will have serious problems blending into a team game, and many players dislike the first-battle-decides-the-game experience.

There needs to be another option for large maps with many expansions, besides getting more powerful ambush specials.  One thing I dislike about Starcraft is situations where the Protoss have no choice but to use Psi storm.  When you annihilate the enemy fleet in one grand action, they feel cheated.  When you have no other choice, you feel trapped.

Still excited to hear moar!

posted on January 27th, 2012, 9:46 pm

Aren't the Dominion (needing only prototypes) and Borg (limited only by collective connections) techtrees already flat?  Why add the Romulans to that list?

posted on January 27th, 2012, 9:48 pm

Yeah I'm really excited to hear more. Even though I'm a fed rat I love to hear about changes to the other factions.

posted on January 27th, 2012, 9:55 pm

Hmm, sound cool, but maybe hard to balance.

IF you could disrupt the enemy strategy, then maybe with something like a limited cloaking device. Cover with a certain ship other ships, that cant cloak, build with the cloaked constructor your expansion, that cannot be seen by the enemy and build there a stationary cloaking device, that will consume special energy in the process - but might be covered, if a singularity emitter is nearby. With this strategy, you might cover you whole expansion and it will only lift, if a cloaking, detection is in progress there.

When you are the enemy, you also have to get in a way to detect this expansion, but this may be higher in the tech-tree and also not very easy to use. So maybe you only get a certain time-interval of "view".

I'd like to see a total sneaky rommie-gameplay, and while the enemy is building and building, your tactic with sneaky and more sneaky should be able to counter it.

Give me something like: If you build a Vor'cha, I build a cloaking generator - and you will see, it is outbalanced.

Up to now, all sneaky approaches from the rommies only looked nice, but were rather useless against a stronger fraction, that just kills you off with raw numbers (dominion, klingons, maybe feds too)

Make it worthful!  :woot:

posted on January 27th, 2012, 10:04 pm

I want longer civilian cloaks with the Cloaking Generator, but permacloaking sounds like a bit too much.

posted on January 27th, 2012, 11:01 pm

Well, gameplay wise, it could be a neat expansion to the actual art of playing strategies. Think of it: What kind of gameplay do you have to do in order to win a match?

--> Kill the enemy, before you get killed. This is the basic element for every fraction. And now we can take different approaches. While the klingons and dominion are good in killing others off, the feds and borg are hard to kill. And what about the rommies? They are something in between this - but this comes to the risk, that they cant fullfill both roles at the same time, so they have to act in... another way. Like: "You cannot hit, what you cant see" or "The moment they detect us, it will be too late"

The feds will have a pretty straightforward gameplay. The question is: How can I accomplish the same tasks with a not-so-straightforward gameplay?

What do you do as romulan, if you see a large mixed fleet of federation ships approaching? Some warbirds wont cut it out, so you need to do... other things, like holographic duplicated, where the feds will waste their firepower on, whil the real ship is somewhere else. Or you "steal" a ship with a certain manouver. Deactivating subsystems should be crucial for romulan gameplay or... laying traps like energy absorbing mines, that will drain the power output of enemy weapons and kill their propulsion systems... anything that can really counter a disadvantage in numbers through... strategy and/or quality.

I can think of a Tavara with massive uber-stats that may play the key role in your strategy. So you fleet consists maybe only of about 5 or 6 ships, while the feds have 20 or so... and you should still be able to push them back.

So many ways...

posted on January 28th, 2012, 1:25 am

Looks interesting. Still rooting for an early valentine release.