The blast will only take you out if you're already low on health, usually, depends on ship and captain. Overall thought I agree much more fun that it used to be.

As for the Romulans, the whole "ally" thing goes two ways. One side, it lets you use the special powers and whatnot from the other two factions, other side, not to many actual Romulan ships, fleets, and officers, you actually have to take an "exchange" officer from your ally, and have to join a Federation of Klingon fleet. Also, there might be an issue with not being able to team up with other Romluans after making a choice of allies. So, in other words a Klingon allied Romulan might not be able to team up with a Starfleet allied Romulan for missions and such. That might be a bug, it might end up being "working as intended." Almost all end game content is void from this, anyone can team up, so they might just write it off.

But as for the missions and stuff, I got lucky and got in closed Beta with no NDA, so I can say the new stuff for Romluans is MILES beyond anything else in the game. The Romulan ship interior is beyond cool (the engine room looks like a PG rated one from Event Horizon). The missions are well written, and engaging (there is a brain washing one that almost had me cursing at the screen, in a good way). And there is a definite continuing story here (haven't finished it yet since there are still coding stuff). Simply put, this is what I wanted with this game from the beginning. And it looks from early views that the Klingon side is getting a similar treatment for lower levels, which means that for once, the Starfleet side is the one that seems left out. Which I'm okay with.