The elite Centurion class is a Romulan explorer most typically found in imperial fleets. Praetor Bervis was once a General in the fleet and led from a Centurion. The battle that gained him the perstige to stake his claim to leadership of the Star Empire was when he led a squadron into Klingon territory to reclaim the Nerandra system, destroying dozens of the Chancellor’s finest warriors in one ambush.
The Centurion is the first faction ship that I ever got strictly from grinding hostiles. I didn’t spend a single faction credit to get mine. It’s a solid explorer, and it’s great on defense.
The Pros of the Centurion
You can see that I haven’t put a whole lot of materials into upgrading my Centurion, for the main reason that I got B’Rel a few days after I picked up the Centurion. I know a lot of people who swear by this ship, I just moved past it pretty quickly.
Here’s the Centurion’s firing pattern. And as you can see, after round one, you’re going to be hitting your opponent four times per round.
This is a ship with powerful phasers, and it fires them often.
It’s also got a good warp range, and it will likely replace your North Star for exploring the galaxy. You’re going to be able to use it to hunt hostiles, and it should help you clear a bunch of missions.
Lastly, with the Pike, Moreau, T’Laan crew, you will be able to use it to hunt swarm. It’s not as efficient in terms of repair costs as your Franklin, but if you don’t have a Franklin, you could use this as a substitute.
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What’s Not To Like
The health and defense of this ship aren’t great. This will make it more important for you to load out your crew to try to cover for this deficiency. So it’s a good thing that the Centurion is heavily armed because the defensive capabilities of this ship are a lot to overcome.
This lack of health and defense is going to hurt you if you’re taking on Saladins, because a few big shots from that big kinetic gun, and you’re history.
The Centurion’s Ship Ability, And How to Use it in PvP
The Centurion’s Ship Ability is “Territorial,” which gives increases the armor, shield deflection, and dodge when defending. And if it’s docked in your station, it gives this bonus to all of your defense platforms AND to any other ships currently docked. This ability starts at 20% and maxes out at 60% at level 45. This is the biggest way that you’re going to overcome the defensive problems of the ship.
Like the Saladin in PvP battles, you have to entice your opponent to attack you, but having done that, a properly-crewed Centurion can take down larger ships. You’re not going to be able to take down an Augur, or another high-powered battleship, but you should be able to take out similarly powered Saladins … if you can entice them into attacking you.
And if you’re triple-faction, and you can put a Saladin, Bortas, and a Centurion in your base, you’re going to be extremely tough to crack.
How To Get It
Grinding for the Centurion is a bit of a catch-22. For most Romulan players, you won’t be able to grind out the Blueprints for a Centurion until you’re actually using a Centurion to grind out Blueprints. If you’ve got a Saladin or a Bortas, however, you find that hostile Romulan ships in level 32+ systems will give you Centurion blueprints. I’ve had the most luck finding them in Iapedes. Kaisu is also a good place to start your search.
Centurion blueprints cost 200 Romulan Credits in the Faction Store. You need to get your shipyard to be level 28 or above to build it, and your Romulan rep to be consort or above to buy the blueprints.
Crewing It
Being an explorer, the Morale crew of epic Kirk, Spock, and McCoy or Sulu would be a good crew for it. This will both help the Centurion’s weak defense with Spock’s shielding, but also take advantage of Sulu’s bonus to energy weapons.
Rukor’s energy weapons bonus in PvP will also be effective.
I’d also suggest Khan with Kirk and Spock for his critical hit chances – as you’re going to be hitting your opponent a lot of times with this ship, and in longer battles, you’re going to be scoring a lot of criticals.
Background
Since no Romulan ships appear anywhere in any of the Kelvin universe films, this one’s an abstraction from other Romulan ships that we’ve seen elsewhere. The closest thing we’ve seen to it onscreen was the slim Romulan warbird, Valdore, that was seen in Star Trek Nemesis.
The Valore itself was named for Admiral Valdore, who was the one in charge of the Romulan drone program in Star Trek Enterprise, the one that destroyed the Kumari.
Valdore was played by Brian Thompson, who’s a veteran character actor who’s played five different characters in three Star Trek series and one movie, Generations. He’s got one of those faces that you know you’ve seen in everything. He made his big-screen debut in The Terminator, followed that up with the fantastically bad Sylvester Stallone movie Cobra, and backed that up with Three Amigos. That’s an awful lot of 80s cred in just three movies.
Centurion Trivia
Obviously, with all things Romulan, the origins are in the Roman empire. Centurion was a rank in the Roman army.
The lowest position an equestrian might hold was also the highest an ordinary soldier could expect to achieve – centurion. These men commanded centuries in the legions or the auxiliary – in the legions, these usually consisted of 80 men. These were the officers who commanded men on a day to day basis, both in war and in camp.
Some men started their careers as centurions, either because they were wealthy or because they were equestrians who could not find a praefecti role. Others were experienced soldiers, usually having served for 15-20 years, who had proved themselves in a more junior position of authority. For an ordinary but hard working citizen soldier, this was the path to wealth, status and even a role in local administration.
And of course, my favorite centurion will always be John Cleese’s stickler for grammar in Life of Brian.
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