Why would anyone WANT a singularity core on it. Are you guys mad ?
Singularity cores have been power creeped to stupid tier. -40 power for what a little jump power... a useless AOE dot, a useless weapon skill, and a decoy thing?
Because it's different, and both the plasma DOT and temporary HP are useful in certain situations.
Why own more than 1 ship at all? Because variety is the spice of life.
It takes a different skill setup and a different build (and use) strategy to properly run a singularity cored ship, and that gives the Romulan ships a unique feel. There are those of us in the game who actually embrace differences instead of just pushing for a narrow meta sameness.
Personally, I think the people who want Romulan ships to be nothing more than Klingon ships with a Romulan hull shape slapped on so they don't have to bother with a different way of doing things are the mad ones, not the ones who want the various faction ships to keep their own distinctive traditional feel.
It takes a different skill setup and a different build (and use) strategy to properly run a singularity cored ship, and that gives the Romulan ships a unique feel. There are those of us in the game who actually embrace differences instead of just pushing for a narrow meta sameness.
Personally, I think the people who want Romulan ships to be nothing more than Klingon ships with a Romulan hull shape slapped on so they don't have to bother with a different way of doing things are the mad ones, not the ones who want the various faction ships to keep their own distinctive traditional feel.
You have it backwards. Romulans gifted the Klingons those toys.
I do fly plenty of romulan ships... but singluarity cores make DEW sci a non option. Sure you could just up the aux to 100 put torps and mines on it and forget about weapon power... but that is the only realistically good build you can put on a Romulan sci ship with a sing core. Trying to run full weapon power on a sci ship with a -40 power handicap doesn't work out very well.
I would be all for a Sing core revamp. Or at least a small buff to the sing core skills in game already. I'm pretty sure however Cryptic shot that down not that long ago... and they aren't overhauling systems at this point with only a few months left on the job.
I really do hope DECA does overhaul the Singularity cores... or really at this point just allow all romulan ships to slot either. Then no one is upset. You want to handicap yourself... so your explosions have a cooler animation you can.
While it is true that singularity cores could use a buff, they are far from hopeless for use in a science destroyer. And yes, part of making them viable is using torpedoes along with energy weapons but you don't have to go pure scitorp either.
Characters optimized for running sing-cored ships generally have more engineer/power skills rather than all tack with a bit of science like the meta would have it. And you have to be very careful with synergies because there is less slop in the power profile to take advantage of, and do such non-meta things as run more torpedoes in the mix than a meta build.
It is not the most inherently efficient system and you have to take full advantage of the generally better cloaks along with keeping situational awareness up in order to use a more freeform dynamic ability triggering instead of a one-fits-all rote rotation, but it is not "handicapping" oneself either, it is just a different way of playing. For people who prefer a submarine style of combat, Romulan ships with singularity cores are the closest Trek games get to it, which is as it should be since the Romulans were based on a U-boat and its crew originally.
One buff that would help if the devs don't want to try balancing the cores better directly would be to give Romulan ships with singularity cores more of an advantage with cloaking, maybe shortening cooldown and/or speeding the cloak/decloak times and making fewer things disable their cloaks compared to warp cored ships.
Herald Sphere in the current event really shows up one of the worst flaws of the way cloaks are implemented right now in fact, since travelling through a gateway disables the cloak and dumps the ship out right in front of an Iconian firing squad to get machinegunned at point-blank range with massed beam and gateway fire without even retaining any movement to raise the defensive value.
Romulan ships in canon were never designed for being damage sponges, the writers for TOS were told to treat Romulan ships like submarines and the Federation and Klingon ships as surface ships, and while it got a bit blurry in the movie/TNG era when the Klingons got their second-rate cloaks, the Romulans were still supposed to be the "space U-boat" users primarily and have the better cloaking tech, and the devs mostly did a reasonably decent job of simulating that though it could use some tweaks.
Game-wise, Fed and KDF (and warp-cored Romulan) ship cloaks should stay the same as they are now since they are primarily 'surface' ships that are sometimes equipped with generally inferior cloaks mainly meant for sneaking around outside of battles and can get away with the "just throw power at it" mentality.
The warp-cored Romulan ships would logically be in the same boat in that respect since they have the more powerful but supposedly noisier warp cores (sort of like the difference between contemporary nuclear and battery powered subs with the same antiechoic hull coatings and whatnot).
Ironically, DSC inadvertently gives a good justification for that since apparently dilithium crystals "sing" to each other in some way (sort of like Darkovan matrix crystals or witch gems from the Witch World novels) so a particular type of sci-scream can cause cascading damage to all of them in range to "hear" it (so to speak), which is probably the only even halfway good thing about that whole "burn" arc nonsense. It would not be a stretch to consider that "song" to be rather difficult to muffle all the way so warp cored ships would be at a disadvantage cloaking-wise.
When Cryptic added Romulan ships... you could argue pretty easily they were the superior sub style ships.
The early warbirds were well balanced. Yes they lost 40 power... but the sing skills on release were actually pretty good. The jump was great in PvP... and unique cause we didn't quite yet have Reputation cores that had built in jumps. The Dot wave was very effective taking care of groups of NPCs in the game at the time. (NPCs have got hull buffs since Rom release) So it was realistic to have a rapid fire build or something... and have your plasma wave for a little aoe on borg probes and the like.
Beyond the obvious core difference. The ships themselves however were also +1s. The T'varo wasn't all universal like a BOP... but it got 4/3 weapons instead of 4/2 and an extra ensign seat. The Dhelan and Mogai were+1 raptors.... with battle cloaks. (All but the BOP KDF side had standard cloaks)
What has happened in the last few years... is the KDF and FED ships (especially lockbox ships like the S31 stuff) have been given all the same bumps. We have 5/3 destroyers. 5/2+experimental battle cloaking battle cruisers. Torp boats like the Terran Eagle... and Surgical strike monsters like the Adamant. Compared directly I mean we got stuff like the S31 sci destroyer in game... it compares probably more to the KDF Dyson on seating, but ya its a better sci destroyer then the Rom Dyson, and it would be painfully a lot better then a Rom Dyson with an actual sing core.
You know what would be an actual easy fix to the entire issue.... is to simply reduce the handicap the sing core imparts. -40 is sort of BS on all ships, its worse on a ship like a sci destroyer where no matter how someone might fly it the intention of the design at least is to switch back and forth between modes that require vastly different power profiles to be effective. Anyway the fix is to simply go in and edit the power draw back. IMO it should probably get halved... -5 power per system instead of -10. I know the way Cryptic has the game done its probably a hard coded value on every single sing core in the game rather then a global number somewhere that is easy to adjust. Anyway that would be a solid fix.... lore reason, the new Romulan Republic is proudly celebrating their new superior open research methods. Without the yoke of the star empire scientists within the republic operating in a more open environment have begun improving old empire technology. They have developed an ingenious new containment algorthem that has greatly improved singularity core power capture.
True, lowering the power level penalty on a singularity core is the best and most straightforward way of doing it, but since the devs seem dead-set against doing that for some reason (possibly the having to go in and fix it in multiple locations thing) I suggested an alternative that might make up for at least some of the problem (not that I think they would actually implement it either).
Lore-wise the Romulans should be making more singularity cores, not less, because they lost their main source of dilithium when Remus was destroyed, and the supply was never that great even before that, which is probably why they invented the singularity core in the first place. In fact, the dilithium supply on Remus in a region nearly empty of the vital resource, poor and difficult to mine as it was, was probably the reason the Romulans initially settled the Romulus system.
Importing nearly all of a nation's energy needs is a bankrupting level of bad for a nation in that situation, the Republic would probably struggle just to supply the Dewan, Suliban, and other foreign ships it already has in its service, let alone actually make new warp core ships themselves.
I know the devs said it was intentional but was there ever a reason given as to why the Romulan ship had a warp core instead of a singularity core?
Not that I have heard of anyway.
Maybe Jette was the last person who knew how to balance the singularity cores, since she left I don't think they have done any of those cross-faction bundles that contained both warp and singularity core ships in it. But that is just a wild guess based on the timing.
I hope we'll also see more content that involves the Dyson Sphere's.
If you just take a moment to stand and watch around in the Battlezone, you'll see how incredibly huge it is. Our 'battlezone' is basically just one big elevated platform, with towers extending miles into the sky.
And all the ground around the platform is littered with even more of those towers, with each tower probably having the same floor space as a small village. The space between them is probably big enough to build entire cities on.
And then there's even bigger constructions that tower over everything else. Which are truly enormous, filling an even bigger part of the sky. Which isn't really sky, but just space that comes before the next layer of ground! Which is also likely littered with enormous towers, platforms like our battlezone and similar sky-filling structures.
There's a lot of potential for storytelling here. And it would seem odd that the Alliance seemingly just abandoned these things after they tried stopping the Voth from getting some particles from them. Surely more is happening there?
I'm not sure the Alliance are ready to start colonising the inside of the Sphere when the Voth are present on the ground and the Undine are present in the skies.
Not to mention the Sphere spawning swarmers whenever it feels threatened.
Maybe once all that tech is disabled and the Voth and Undine are dealt with...
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Comments
Because it's different, and both the plasma DOT and temporary HP are useful in certain situations.
Why own more than 1 ship at all? Because variety is the spice of life.
Personally, I think the people who want Romulan ships to be nothing more than Klingon ships with a Romulan hull shape slapped on so they don't have to bother with a different way of doing things are the mad ones, not the ones who want the various faction ships to keep their own distinctive traditional feel.
You have it backwards. Romulans gifted the Klingons those toys.
I do fly plenty of romulan ships... but singluarity cores make DEW sci a non option. Sure you could just up the aux to 100 put torps and mines on it and forget about weapon power... but that is the only realistically good build you can put on a Romulan sci ship with a sing core. Trying to run full weapon power on a sci ship with a -40 power handicap doesn't work out very well.
I would be all for a Sing core revamp. Or at least a small buff to the sing core skills in game already. I'm pretty sure however Cryptic shot that down not that long ago... and they aren't overhauling systems at this point with only a few months left on the job.
I really do hope DECA does overhaul the Singularity cores... or really at this point just allow all romulan ships to slot either. Then no one is upset. You want to handicap yourself... so your explosions have a cooler animation you can.
Characters optimized for running sing-cored ships generally have more engineer/power skills rather than all tack with a bit of science like the meta would have it. And you have to be very careful with synergies because there is less slop in the power profile to take advantage of, and do such non-meta things as run more torpedoes in the mix than a meta build.
It is not the most inherently efficient system and you have to take full advantage of the generally better cloaks along with keeping situational awareness up in order to use a more freeform dynamic ability triggering instead of a one-fits-all rote rotation, but it is not "handicapping" oneself either, it is just a different way of playing. For people who prefer a submarine style of combat, Romulan ships with singularity cores are the closest Trek games get to it, which is as it should be since the Romulans were based on a U-boat and its crew originally.
One buff that would help if the devs don't want to try balancing the cores better directly would be to give Romulan ships with singularity cores more of an advantage with cloaking, maybe shortening cooldown and/or speeding the cloak/decloak times and making fewer things disable their cloaks compared to warp cored ships.
Herald Sphere in the current event really shows up one of the worst flaws of the way cloaks are implemented right now in fact, since travelling through a gateway disables the cloak and dumps the ship out right in front of an Iconian firing squad to get machinegunned at point-blank range with massed beam and gateway fire without even retaining any movement to raise the defensive value.
Romulan ships in canon were never designed for being damage sponges, the writers for TOS were told to treat Romulan ships like submarines and the Federation and Klingon ships as surface ships, and while it got a bit blurry in the movie/TNG era when the Klingons got their second-rate cloaks, the Romulans were still supposed to be the "space U-boat" users primarily and have the better cloaking tech, and the devs mostly did a reasonably decent job of simulating that though it could use some tweaks.
Game-wise, Fed and KDF (and warp-cored Romulan) ship cloaks should stay the same as they are now since they are primarily 'surface' ships that are sometimes equipped with generally inferior cloaks mainly meant for sneaking around outside of battles and can get away with the "just throw power at it" mentality.
The warp-cored Romulan ships would logically be in the same boat in that respect since they have the more powerful but supposedly noisier warp cores (sort of like the difference between contemporary nuclear and battery powered subs with the same antiechoic hull coatings and whatnot).
Ironically, DSC inadvertently gives a good justification for that since apparently dilithium crystals "sing" to each other in some way (sort of like Darkovan matrix crystals or witch gems from the Witch World novels) so a particular type of sci-scream can cause cascading damage to all of them in range to "hear" it (so to speak), which is probably the only even halfway good thing about that whole "burn" arc nonsense. It would not be a stretch to consider that "song" to be rather difficult to muffle all the way so warp cored ships would be at a disadvantage cloaking-wise.
The early warbirds were well balanced. Yes they lost 40 power... but the sing skills on release were actually pretty good. The jump was great in PvP... and unique cause we didn't quite yet have Reputation cores that had built in jumps. The Dot wave was very effective taking care of groups of NPCs in the game at the time. (NPCs have got hull buffs since Rom release) So it was realistic to have a rapid fire build or something... and have your plasma wave for a little aoe on borg probes and the like.
Beyond the obvious core difference. The ships themselves however were also +1s. The T'varo wasn't all universal like a BOP... but it got 4/3 weapons instead of 4/2 and an extra ensign seat. The Dhelan and Mogai were+1 raptors.... with battle cloaks. (All but the BOP KDF side had standard cloaks)
What has happened in the last few years... is the KDF and FED ships (especially lockbox ships like the S31 stuff) have been given all the same bumps. We have 5/3 destroyers. 5/2+experimental battle cloaking battle cruisers. Torp boats like the Terran Eagle... and Surgical strike monsters like the Adamant. Compared directly I mean we got stuff like the S31 sci destroyer in game... it compares probably more to the KDF Dyson on seating, but ya its a better sci destroyer then the Rom Dyson, and it would be painfully a lot better then a Rom Dyson with an actual sing core.
You know what would be an actual easy fix to the entire issue.... is to simply reduce the handicap the sing core imparts. -40 is sort of BS on all ships, its worse on a ship like a sci destroyer where no matter how someone might fly it the intention of the design at least is to switch back and forth between modes that require vastly different power profiles to be effective. Anyway the fix is to simply go in and edit the power draw back. IMO it should probably get halved... -5 power per system instead of -10. I know the way Cryptic has the game done its probably a hard coded value on every single sing core in the game rather then a global number somewhere that is easy to adjust. Anyway that would be a solid fix.... lore reason, the new Romulan Republic is proudly celebrating their new superior open research methods. Without the yoke of the star empire scientists within the republic operating in a more open environment have begun improving old empire technology. They have developed an ingenious new containment algorthem that has greatly improved singularity core power capture.
Lore-wise the Romulans should be making more singularity cores, not less, because they lost their main source of dilithium when Remus was destroyed, and the supply was never that great even before that, which is probably why they invented the singularity core in the first place. In fact, the dilithium supply on Remus in a region nearly empty of the vital resource, poor and difficult to mine as it was, was probably the reason the Romulans initially settled the Romulus system.
Importing nearly all of a nation's energy needs is a bankrupting level of bad for a nation in that situation, the Republic would probably struggle just to supply the Dewan, Suliban, and other foreign ships it already has in its service, let alone actually make new warp core ships themselves.
Not that I have heard of anyway.
Maybe Jette was the last person who knew how to balance the singularity cores, since she left I don't think they have done any of those cross-faction bundles that contained both warp and singularity core ships in it. But that is just a wild guess based on the timing.
If you just take a moment to stand and watch around in the Battlezone, you'll see how incredibly huge it is. Our 'battlezone' is basically just one big elevated platform, with towers extending miles into the sky.
And all the ground around the platform is littered with even more of those towers, with each tower probably having the same floor space as a small village. The space between them is probably big enough to build entire cities on.
And then there's even bigger constructions that tower over everything else. Which are truly enormous, filling an even bigger part of the sky. Which isn't really sky, but just space that comes before the next layer of ground! Which is also likely littered with enormous towers, platforms like our battlezone and similar sky-filling structures.
There's a lot of potential for storytelling here. And it would seem odd that the Alliance seemingly just abandoned these things after they tried stopping the Voth from getting some particles from them. Surely more is happening there?
Not to mention the Sphere spawning swarmers whenever it feels threatened.
Maybe once all that tech is disabled and the Voth and Undine are dealt with...