What would you think of adding EPTs as a Romulan only weapon then?This all brings me back to what is the easiest fix, and it still seems clear to me that adding EPTs is it. It is a one paragraph rule that improves plasma without the need to change all the cards (or without the need to refer to a chart instead of what is on the cards - though this has been done in at least one case with the LDR).
That still does nothing to help the huge point problem Romulans have for the inclusion of a useless device, which I also agree is a separate problem. One for which I have no obvious solution. Cloak in SFB is both more restricting and much more effective as a defense. Part of what makes it so restricting, however, is that acceleration limits in SFB. The cloak is a much more complicated issue.
It seems to me that the plasma problem is partly that plasma takes time to work, because often you fire a seeker not in the expectation of getting a decisive hit, or even of getting a hit at all, but of setting up a situation down the road from which you can profit. If you're Gorns, that might consist of getting the enemy to turn away, so you can chase them, and later carronade them. But against say, Feds on a closed board, you simply may not have the time to play that kind of a patience game, because they're going to jam you up in a corner and hit you with overloaded photons. The Romulans then have a problem a bit like the Klingons do, when fighting a heavy crunch race on a closed board. (An awful lot of Fed and Hydran tactics come down to jamming someone up in a corner. Take away those corners, and they start to look a lot less intimidating.)
