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Introduction
The Romulans are much like the Klingons in the sense that they are harder to use but have greater potential when used correctly. All of the Romulan special weapons reflect the Romulan philosophy: deciet and stealth. All Romulan Warships are equipped with cloaking devices (see bottom) and their weapons concentrate on trickery or espionage, hopefully you get the idea.
Cloaking
Everyone has different views on cloaking, in my general opinion, it's not a good idea, it can be very good against a player who either does research tachyon detection grid and doesn't have sensor arrays or a player who just doesn't research tachyon detection grid at all. But most online players research tachyon detection grid and build sensor arrays, and if your enemy meets these two requirements, I'd say, just forget about cloaking. You never want to get caught with your pants down by moving your entire fleet into an enemy stronghold and have half you ships die before they are able to uncloak, your shields are down when you cloak, and if the enemy can see you, they can shoot you, and if they can shoot you with out you having your shields raised, you're dead. So the basic cloaking rule is: cloak if the person is stupid, and doesn't have tachyon detection grid, or cloak away from well fortified areas.
Using their ships
A note: All Romulan ships have an extra special weapon: cloaking, however, the Romulans gained this advantage at a cost; the strength and power of Romulan ships is generally lower than that of their counterparts. Anyway, back to the strategy, the romulan scout is the same as corresponding enemy ships, except for the fact that it has a cloaking device which can be good for early reconaissance (usually not of supreme importance). The Shrike class is, needless to say, like it's counterparts. It's special weapon is useful and unique, you can beam an operative onboard an enemy unit and see the location of other enemy units, the units you can see depend on where you beam the operative, if you beam it on a battleship, you'll see enemy warships or battleships (I don't know exactly, I've never tried it) if you beam it onto a dilithium refinery you'll see other refineries and the harvesters, this can be good because you can then approximate the enemy's economy. The best place to beam an operative is (hopefully you can guess) that's right, a Starbase, this will allow you to see all enemy units (very important: this 'seeing' is temporary, in fact this sight lasts 20 seconds or so, but it's more than enough time to get the positions of the buildings; perhaps the thought has crossed your mind? By now you should know that if you know where the enemy buildings are (especially weapon turrets) you can demolish them with your Raptor's tri-cobalt torpedo. Anyway, I hope you get the general feel for the Romulan spy. The Raptor is a great ship all around, it attacks just like the Federation steamrunner. It's special weapon is a different matter though, I believe it's called a Myotronic Inhibitor? It doesn't really matter anyway, it's function is simple; when an enemy comes bullying on your poor, defenseless, weak little Raptors simply deploy this weapon disabling weapon and perhaps you can kill 'em with your other ships before they know what happens and retreat, if your careful, you can even pound them witht the tri cobalt torpedo if they're not darting all around the place. I'm just going to skip over the stuff on the Griffin itself because it's basically the same as all the other cruiser1's. The special weapon is not too complicated itself, it's not as good as the other cruiser1's special weapons if you ask me though; it reduces enemy ship's (within a certain radius) sensors to a tiny ring just around the enemy ship. Your on your own on this one, it's a pretty straightfoward weapon and your going to have to come up with your own tactics becuase I can't really think of any other than the ultra-obvious: disable the enemy's sensors so he can see things around him, I know just how helpful this was ;-) The Warbird is like it's counter parts, y'know, i'm really sick of saying that, so i'm gonna stop saying it except for this last time: Ships of the same class (class = battleship, destroyer, scout, etc...) are very, very, similar, if not identical with the exception of special weapons. If there are any balance issues, one of them is definately with the shield inversion gadget; the shield inversion beam takes another ship's shields and puts them around your ship. Umm....no fancy tactics with this one, it's a crude, straight forward weapon. Allright, now for the Shadow; it's phase cloak: arguably not to useful (like most of the other special ships' weapons) I mean, what are you going to do, spend 15000 to send 10 weak ships through an asteroid field, all your going to do is bypass the turrets & ships (which will shortly make their way to your expensive Shadows and crush them. If you must use the phase cloak think hit & run, deal some damage, cloak through the asteroid field before the enemy can rally their ships to kill you. the Shield Extender: I can only think of one use for this, fortify the shields of a phoenix as it is trying to make it's way to the kamikaze site. (you'll also lose the shadow, so I sure hope you can deal 4150 worth of damage to your enemy if you try this. the holo emitter is good for confusing the enemy when trying to retreat, or is also good for create the havoc needed to deploy a phoenix (read below) The last weapon is the psyonic blast; it kills 1/2 the crew on an enemy unit (not too useful unless the crew supply is very limited) I'm kinda sick of typing & not playing Armada, so I'm gonna be quick with the last but certainly not least of the Romulan's ships, the phoenix, the phoenix destroys everything within a medium sized radius around it, use it on clumps of buildings or ships. The trick to getting this ship into place is to create as much distraction, mahem, & confusion as you possibly can before deploying this thing, other wise, the enemy will see it coming and kill it before it has a chance it cause 3000 worth of damage. Oh, and by the way, if it's about to die and it's not around any of your units or the target site, go ahead and deploy it, if it has to die, it might as well take some enemies with it.
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Star Trek is copyright 2000 Paramount -- Viacom; Star Trek: Armada is copyright 2000 Activision; all other material and images are copyright 2000 Rob Stefanussen