COMPARED TO THE BATTLESHIPS OF THE OTHER TWO MAJOR Trek powers, the Z-1 Nova is more like a battle-cruiser.  Not as brutish as the L-24 and certainly not as powerful as the Excelsior class, the Nova is a poor man's battleship.
        The main problem, as I see it, is that none of the Romulan vessels from the FASA manuals ever have a decent torpedo weapon.   The writers were faithful to the backstory of Trek itself when they wrote up the fact that the Romulans were reluctant users of torp technology.  The Romulans instead focused on their home-grown plasma weapon, and many of their prime ship designs are centered around one of the plasma weapons as a main gun.  The plasma weapon eats up a lot of juice, however, and still can't give you the punch of a torpedo.  Torpedoes are the best cost-to-damage ratio weapons in the entire game, and on very large ships that must expend the lion's share of their power allocation on movement, it's handy to be able to have torpedoes armed by the time you get where you need to go.
        The Z-1 type 1, even with its 6 torpedo tubes, can only inflict about as much total damage in the forward firing arc as an Enterprise class cruiser.  The type 2, not found in the Romulan Ship Recognition Manual, but seen in the STSSTCS main manual instead, is better off with a total of 8 torpedoes, 12 disruptors, and more superstructure, but even still the combined firepower is not quite as impressive as the battleship designs of the other two governments.  (Though certainly better than the type 1!)
        The Z-1 looks fantastic from an artistic standpoint.  A very creative design!  Great feathering effect along the warp engine pylons/wings.  I think this is one of the best Romulan designs out of the entire manual.  I can easily picture a ship like this in one of the Trek feature films.  It would have been right at home, especially squaring off against Sulu and the Excelsior, or Kirk and the Enterprise-A.  It's really a damned shame that the Trek writers and producers didn't focus more on the Romulans in the feature films.  Only with the latest Next Generation film are the Romulans going to get some screen time.  But wouldn't it have been fun to see more of the Romulans before now?  Especially if they rode around in ships like this?
        As with several of the other very-recent FASA Romulan ships, I've added three more types beyond those of FASA that carry this class forward into the 24th century, making it current with the tech of the TNG era, or at least capable of standing up to a fight with some of the TNG-era ships of the other governments.  I reason that such a relatively modern class, a contemporary of the Excelsior, would likely have an effective lifespan similar to that of the Excelsior, undergoing one or more refits during its lifetime.
        2020 note: I finally got around to re-drawing this class.  It only took me 20 years!  Like so many other FASA designs, the three aspects of the original Z-1 schematic do not align with each other very well.  Especially since the original artist used a lot of "greeblie" detail which suggested structure without actually defining that structure.  In some cases I had to make some deliberate alterations, while still working hard to adhere to the outline and 'flow' of the FASA drawing.  Like most of my other re-draws, I also included stern and ventral views, which had to be extrapolated from the other three.  All in all, it was an enjoyable and worthwhile project.  The Z-1 is a titan in the FASA game.  It deserves to look the part.

        — BRT