Ok, I created a test toon the other day

brewtolomus

It's a Romulan Tactical, and I went Fed instead of Klingon to see for myself why people advised against it.
Gotta tell ya...I like my Romulan Science Officer with the Klingon alliance better, so far.
But he's lvl 50, flying about in a fancy-schmancy store bought ship.

And my new guy is skulking about in the free Romulan ship that is available to the Subcommander rank.

If I can make it to lvl 50 without investing much as far as ship equipment goes, then I'll either keep him or delete him, depending on how much fun I had getting there.

I am assuming if I use a Fed ship, I won't be able to use the Romulan Singularity doohickeys.

TL;DR version.
I need to know if it's worth using a Fed ship for a Romulan.

twam

Do you like having more subsystem power or singularity powers and a battlcloak better?

That's the main question, here...

brewtolomus

twam wrote: »

Do you like having more subsystem power or singularity powers and a battlcloak better?

That's the main question, here...

Honestly, I'm not sure yet.

hevach

Honestly, you won't notice the missing power that much unless you dig into the nitpicky details (the difference does show up under scrutiny, but not so much if you just take a seat and play). You will notice having the battle cloak, and maybe the singularity powers.

You can't use allied ships at tier 5, so really unless you just need a cruiser at tiers 1-3 or a science vessel at tiers 1-4, I've never considered allied ships worth it except to take their universal consoles.

shockwave85

The main considerations of which ally you choose have to do with:

1. Doffing - Diplomacy or Marauding. Flat out, Marauding is better. Easiest way to get dilithium in the game is to fly around, queue up Marauding assignments, then rake in Contraband and prisoners. Fly around more, queue up Forced Labor assignments to turn prisoners into dil, and talk to the Security Officer at starbases to turn Contraband into Dil. Diplomacy has nothing like this, except about a month of tedious Doffing to unlock your transwarps. Oh, and a uniform with weird texture issues.

2. C-Store consoles - Specifically, the ones on the low tier ships that you can use on your later ships. The availability of some consoles in lockbox cross-faction console packs has white washed this to a large degree, but still worth considering

3. Fleet resources - There are far fewer KDF fleets with high tier fleet holdings than Fed ones. For fleets that maintain a fleet on each faction, often the Fed one is much further along (In our case, SSOG is almost done its starbase while KSOG just cracked T4). Just a result of there being so many more Fed players in general pumping resources into these things. This can mean very different access to high end fleet gear depending on what fleet's you're in and which faction they may favor. Things like the Public Service channel mitigate this a lot though.

In the end, you're still a Romulan. At T5, you will be flying Warbirds. You will be loading up on Subterfuge and Operative traits on your Boffs. The Doffing is the biggest functional difference. Everything else is either a matter of your and your fleet's resources, or purely cosmetic.

theonetruetom

It is rather hilarious to see the Tal Shiar completely ignore the fact that their "ally" is flying around in a Phalanx, though.

sonnikku

Yeah well the Romulan people were already nearly wiped out from the Romulus incident, became fractured right down the middle from what was left of them between the Republic/Talshiar and then D'tan in his infinite wisdom decided to split what was left of his republic into Fed/KDF allies during a time of war, killing each other. Republic killing other Republic Romulans. So honestly, at this point, nothing is too crazy any more. :P

As for OP concerns, it really isn't that big of a deal. You'll fly the leveling ships for maybe couple days then you'll never look back. I suppose if it was important to me I'd pick a defiant over a double D because in addition to having lower power levels without all the skill points propping it up, some Romulan ships are SLOW turners. Not very conductive towards efficient leveling.

noroblad

I must be missing something -- the ONLY ships they offered me for free as a Rom at the lower levels were warbirds. I could pay zen or dil for a faction ship, but you can't just pick say a fed science vessel with your level up tokens.

And while I can see buying a ship at 50, at 50, you cannot use the fed or kling ships.

not sure what I missed, but it looks to me like you are stuck using rom ships the entire career unless you pay money, which seems foolish before 50.

brewtolomus

noroblad wrote: »

I must be missing something -- the ONLY ships they offered me for free as a Rom at the lower levels were warbirds. I could pay zen or dil for a faction ship, but you can't just pick say a fed science vessel with your level up tokens.

And while I can see buying a ship at 50, at 50, you cannot use the fed or kling ships.

not sure what I missed, but it looks to me like you are stuck using rom ships the entire career unless you pay money, which seems foolish before 50.

Yeah those are only ones I'm offered for free as well.
I did purchase the romdreadnaught 3pak recently for a different toon, and if this crash-test rommy makes it to lvl 50, then he'll get one.
But I am doing my best to avoid spending ANYTHING on this toon.