Hello everyone!

My name is Harel, balance lead for Paradoxical Design group, and once again, I want to talk to you about the future of ships in New Horizons. I promise one of these days our dev diaries will address other areas besides ships… but for now, we got some juicy bits to share with you!

This time, I want to talk specifically about Romulan and Klingon shops.

A brief history

As you may recall from our previous dev diaries, in the Birth of a Federation update we have introduced a revolutionary new concept into New Horizons – individual ship classes. Instead of using global classes such as ‘Battleship’ or ‘cruiser’, with equal statistics and components for every species, we now have individual classes, each tailored to a specific Starfleet class.

Our plan in the next update is to expand this to include both Klingons and Romulans. Both species will no longer have the typical era system of other species, nor the typical classes. Instead, like the Federation, they will have a selection of individual ship classes. Those ships will become obsolete, just like the Federation, and will have tech limits, just like the Federation. They will also be able to retire or re-introduce old ships via their own museum mechanic.

Like Starfleet, Klingon and Romulan ships will also be grouped into archetypes, with new ships in every archetype retiring the old ships from circulation. However, the two proud empires will have their own, individual archetypes that have nothing similar between each other or the Federations’ archetypes. In this dev diary, I’m going to go into a little detail about the archetypes you can expect to see in our next update and the balance work behind it.

Klingons

As you can expect, Klingon ships are all about offense. Especially in the early stages of the game, the Klingon has sheer firepower advantage, despite having smaller and often cheaper ships. One of the Klingon’s civic is going to be retrofitted as to offer a discount on all ship naval costs (which will be reflected in their ships actual naval cost).

Also, while this is not consistently true, Klingons also tend to rely on tested-and-true designs far more than most other species – their ships are meant to serve a long time, and usually tech limits are not so strict for most of their ships as they are for other species.

This does come at a cost – Klingons ships are less resilient than most ships, relying on armor and not on hull or shields to carry them through battle. They also tend to have fewer utilities than other ship designs and have less ability to specialize and customize their ships.

Klingon Archetypes:

1. Bird of Prey (and gunboats): the basic ‘frigates’ or ‘corvettes’ of the Klingon fleet are their birds of prey. Those are heavier and more powerful ships than their counterparts, equipped with extra powerful thrusters and speed-related utilities and bonuses. These ships gain bonuses to evasion and speed.

Gunboats are smaller variants of existing birds of prey that are used by local Klingon houses, militias, and garrisons. You will not be able to build those directly, but they will be a key part of an exciting new Klingon mechanic.

2. Raptors: Like the Bird of Prey is a heavier ‘frigate’, so is the Raptor a heavier ‘destroyer’. It eschews the typical policy of most species to have a beefy, ‘tank’ archetype in favor of putting even more guns on small ships. The raptor is a pure space superiority archetype, with a picket sensor, point defense weapons and an oversized warp core (along with a snare aura).

3. Raider: the brutal and aggressive tendencies of the Klingons are very apparent in the raider. Where most species gain a raider-equivalent late in the game, the Klingon raider comes very early, supporting extra tactical utilities, exotic torpedo support and a short range ‘Blitzer’ sensor. The Raiders can equip prototype cloak engines (like in A voyage home) and do incredible hull damage to their enemies.

4. Battle Cruiser: the Klingon battle cruiser is the main ship of the line for the Klingons, unlike most species which use the cruiser for this task – which means these ships are cheap to maintain. Battlecruisers are versatile, having both extra engineering utilities but also support for exotic torpedoes, debuff auras, fighters, and a sniper sensor! The result is a very deadly combo. For that reasons, the Klingons replace their battle cruiser designs more than any other archetypes, and they come with a relatively small tech range.

5. Warships: as the Klingons prefer large fleets of small, nimble ships, it has taken them time until they will start to build the massive, billion tons ships that are favored by other species. The result is a ship that is a-typically expensive for the Klingons, but one that is quite potent. It is one of the few ships that have a support aura with a great deal of offensive power and support for both fighters and extra-large spinal energy weapons. A skirmisher sensor makes it a very resilient ship, for Klingons, as well as the additional AUX utility.

6. Flagships: Finally, the Klingons can field a ship of terrible power, over a mile long – an oversized version of their most successful ship design, the Negh’var. This new class, the Jeh’jhong, is expensive but is deadlier than any other ship that can be built by most species. It has many defenses and can mount numerous spinal weapons – along with point defense, for complete mastery of the sky. While it cannot equip the sophisticated technology of the Romulan’s scimitar, in a typical fight it is more than its match.

Romulans

Designing the Romulan ships was not easy. There has been very little canonical information about Romulan ships, and very few Romulan classes were ever shown on screen – fewer than Klingons, even.

In principle, the idea is that Romulan ships are highly specialized and meant to be unique, non-standard ‘cookie-cutters’. Most of their designs will have no parallels in other classes. All Romulan ships also have extra large shields and their ships tend to be quite large compared to other classes.

Romulan Archetypes:

1. Bird of Prey: the Romulan Bird of Prey is nothing like the Klingon’s. While the Klingons have a stronger hull and extra weapons, the Bird of Prey is a smart ship, equipped with extra utilities, point defense, and a picket sensor. Those ships are relatively expensive and frail, however, so be careful.

2. Interceptor: Another unique Romulan design, it allows very early access to both the short-range Blitzer sensor and extra-large spinal weapons. The extra-large thrusters make the Interceptor a sort of mobile artillery, while the point defense weapons and snare aura allow it to handle small fleets.

3. Warbird: like the Klingons, the Romulan main ship of the line is more like a battlecruiser than a cruiser. These are where the similarities end, as the Warbird comes with all the typical tools of a battlecruiser: support for exotic torpedoes, extra tactical utilities, and a sniper sensor. Add an extra powerful warp core (or a singularity core in the case of the Romulans) and you get a very dangerous ship that specializes in destroying the shields of enemy ships from afar.

4. Starbird: the Romulan ‘cruiser’, or ‘tank’ ship, is a none-typical ship for the Romulans. Unlike other ships of their design, it does not have oversized shields but instead relies on armor (as well as weapons that can destroy armor with ease). A debuff aura, skirmisher sensor, and extra engineering utilities give the Starbird extra staying power.

5. Battleship: The Romulans gain the battleship, their support aura platform ship, earlier than any other species in the game. While less armored and durable, these ships come with many utilities, as well as support for fighters and powerful torpedo.

6. Sword: The only Sword archetype ship in the Romulan arsenal is the dreadnought-sized Scimitar-Class. It is one of the most dreaded ships in the galaxy, mostly for its ability to equip a whole range of unique technologies, including extra powerful shields, cloaks, reactors and spinal mounts.

What else?

Trekkies with a deep passion for the Original Series will know that on occasions Romulans and Klingons shared technology and even some ship designs. You can certainly expect to see some exchange of that happening, with Romulans being able to gain some limited access to select Klingon ships, while the Klingons could gain an additional ship with the help of a joint design venture.

Those things, of course, can only happen if the two empires are in a good relation – which with the violent temper of the Klingons and the calculating nature of the Romulans, may not be so easy at all!