Dominion need attention

posted on March 11th, 2009, 6:32 pm

There have been several patches released to V3 since the initial build.
All the races with the exception of the Dominion ae getting adjustments and upgrades and new features.

The Borg with the exception of the miner issue are pretty ok atm. One weakness that remains, is if an opponent were to engage the borg and cause losses to the few ships built in a war of attrition, the borg would get bogged down tryiong to keep the existing fleet alive and not be able to have enough (not even by virtue or gradual accumulation) to move on above a sphere or assimilator.
The suggestions for miners in Borg and Optimization were pretty good for allowing some compensation at least.
Other than that the borg are perfect.

Feds are getting a lot of attention, tweaks, and new features.
Klings aer already spammers and build up a decent fleet pretty well.
Roms are a bit slow, but cater more to the skill of the player in baancing his fleet - typically romulan. Tavara number nerfing was a disappointment.

The Dominion however, with the exception of having a mainstay ship like the Dreadnought left to a pariah mixed tech build status, has received no additional attention that would be worth the name.

At this time, Dominion resource management is a nightmare. Sure, people will come on quoting how they cannot win against Dominion or how they brilliantly managed the resources against some noob; but that's neither here nor there.
Dominion supply management in particular (not so much dilithium and trilithium) are a drag on the entire ship building scheme.

Certainly there are those who will preen their skills and claim fanciful grace in managing Dominion resources, the fact still remains that the supply aspect is a dominion inefficiency as opposed to being a resource that needs gathering..
If one were to look at what the feds or klings were to be able to build in a specific timeperiod and compare that to the dominion keeping the number of moons constant (early game, mid game and late game) we find that teh Dominion are left slower in all aspects than the feds and klings - both in progress as well as building.

As regards ships themselves:
The rommies have sufficient ships such as the tavara, norexan, warbird and generix supports that can carry the fleet.
The feds pump sovs and descents
klings have the neghs, the chutpa class, vorchas
but more important for the feds and klings is the ability to keep the yards churning through the lower resource management requirements of these races.

The Dominion fleet however is limited to battelcruisers and a few support cruisers and s-7s. Breen tech has the Breen battleship which is the only silver lininig.
The rest of the dominion fleet do not measure up to the Feds, Roms, or klings
let alone the borg.

Regardless of the people who claim they can't beat the Dominion, or people who claim they play just fine against feds with it, the fact remains that the Dominion have not been looked at in a major way since PR.

given the changes that are being made to the feds/klings, and occasionally to the Rom/Borg, the Dominion most certainly need attention from the mods to make sure they arent left as a race of defense stations that are backed up by ships, in fact the other way around.

they do dig in, so the stations play a vital role, but building ships in a manner that is Dominionesque should be an important aspect of their abilities as well.

posted on March 11th, 2009, 6:46 pm

Once again i agree with you serpicus 

I have some ideas about the Dominion, but nothing solid (hehe) yet.

Do you have any ideas , or said in another way, if you could change the Dominion like you wanted, what would you do ?

posted on March 11th, 2009, 6:47 pm

The first and the second patch for v3 included many Dominion changes and balancing fixes. there was nothing major in the last patches as we are happy with the Dominion. I can#t see your problem with resource management. I play Dominion quite often myself and never felt its more complicated - in my opinion its the other way round, not always going back to the mainbase and buying new supplies

We do always watch at all the races and adjust them as needed, just major redos that involve modeling or more time-extensive rebalancing are done one at a time (like we currently do with the Klingon models and Romulan features), but balancing still continues for all the races. The Federation or the Romulans don't get more attention then the Dominion does. We split our attention and balancing equally

If you don't find the Dominion to match your playstyle its probably not the race for you. Unlike most RTS games the races in Fleet Operations are quite different from their unit lineup and playstyle, thats something we want to extend in the future.

I'm happy with the Dominion so far, but I'm always up to the communities suggestions. Any ideas, suggestions or thoughts?

posted on March 11th, 2009, 7:28 pm

I have to say I, too, dont find the resource management difficult when I play as Dominion. Yes you need to build an extra station for supplies but you only need 1 per 2 moons and your fine for the rest of the game.
I also do not see the need to include more battleships into Dominion arsenal. They never were a race that depended on main battleships, like, for example, the Romulans do. With the Dominion you need to mix up your ships even more so than with other races because they do not posses any all-round ships comparable to Vorcha/Akira/Generix.
However they do posses specialist ships like the T-15 which is THE best anti-destroyer ship in the game considering the cost.
I do agree with 1 part of your post though and that is that their tech tree seems rather "standart" 2 yards and 2 research stations and that is it. I, too would like the ship building at least to be more Dominion-like, but how to achieve that? I haven't thought about it tbh, but for the sake of this post Ill make something up

1st Idea: Make Dominion ships build in "groups". Since their ship construction is a lot faster than all other races if they have enough resources and their ships are build modulary. I was thinking something about this: for instance you can still order only 1 vessle and it builds as long as it does now, but you can also order for the yard to build like 2 or 4 or 8 ships at once and they would still cost the same ammount of resources but they would be build faster, the more ships you order, the faster they are built. That would make it a dangerous game indeed, to leave the Dominion build up in peace and it would make them unique and more canon IMO since they are known for their mass production.
For this idea to work, the Dominion yards would need new, bigger, models and some Dominion ships would need to be nerfed. But I, personally, really like this idea

2nd Idea: Periodically decrease the build time for Dominion ships, depending on how many you build. So while you may wait a long time for the first ship to be build, every ship that follows would build faster until the yard optimizes the build production and you get to a certain build-time which is significantly faster than the original build time.
This would mean, that as the game advances the Dominion would be in a stronger postition as their build times would decrease significantly. This bonus could also be lost if the yard is destroyed, which would, again, promote offensive strategy vs Dominion players

3rd Idea: Maybe just add some researches to Dominion yards which would optimize ship construction, thus decreasing the resources needed and the time needed to build a ship. This is the lease imaginative idea of the lot, but also the most straight forward one and IMO it wouldnt give the team too many problems implementing it.

So this is it for now, I need to go watch Champions League Post some of your ideas and maybe we can convince the team to add them to the mod 

posted on March 11th, 2009, 8:10 pm

I kinda like the idea of optimized yards, but it could be taken a step farther.  Let them run like real life shipyards.  Build the basic yard.  Pick a prototype, or a quick-researching 'tech'.  That yard is now configured for that ship type and cranks them out quick and plentiful, but that's the ONLY ship it can build now.  If you do a different config, it changes to that ship type for production.  It encourages the large facilities of the dominion, though you might end up seeing 5 bugship yards spitting out an endless stream of cheap, fast destroyers.

That's pretty in-character for the Dominion, though.  I know that I myself had my supply flowing in so fast that I was limited only by Dilithium and Tritanium.  Mainly Dilithium because bugships and V-13s are easy on the tritanium, even with 4 yards for each spitting them out as fast as I could mine the dilithium for them.

[Anonymous]

posted on March 11th, 2009, 8:18 pm

Last edited by Anonymous on March 12th, 2009, 2:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

I was hoping we could move the Dominion to a more unique style as we did with the Borg.

1. Allow the miner and supply gatherer to mine from the same moon simultaneously. in maps with 2 or 4 moons per side, this becomes especially relevant.
If not simultaneous, then easier still, instead of 25 have each supply ship gather 40 supply in the same number of orbits.

2. Scarab. It takes too long to construct. The scarab is a weak ship, but is the mainstay of the dominion fleet. Im not advocating a scarab spam... god alone knows we've seen enough bop spams from a1. But a 15-20% reduction in their build time would help
also, as the scarab increases in experience, it;s offensive value and damage inflicted by ram, should be increased from what a current rank increase yields for the scarab. say 20% more than current increments yield for a scarab. defense remains as it is so balance is the short life of a scarab by virtue of its shield weakness.
the other ships maintain the same increments based on rank.

It is because Dominion ship building is initially stymied by the need for slow built prototypes that we need scarabs to fill the gap.

3. The Dominion "Dig in and build" mantra vis a vis advanced turrets should be encouraged. the advanced turret of the dominion (dont know the name, the one which is shaped like a large cross and has rotating barrels around it and can tachyon scan) should be allowed to be built in larger numbers

4. reduce the number of Dominion ship classes.
Adopt a limited number of ship chassis. S-7, V-17, scarab, breen cruiser, breen battelshiip, a couple more cruiser chassis.
allow these chassis to be the mainstay ship classes.
each chassis will need prototypes. once the prototype is ready, the chassis will be available at the shipyard in question.
chassis upgrades should progress as-
example - v17 starts out now at 38 35 32 stats. it has a certain cost and building speed.
instead of this we have the prototype giving us class 30 28 25 stats @ about 65% the cost of the current V-17 battelcruiser. and 70% build time.
chassis 2 for this class will need to be upgraded by research on the prototype.
this will unlock v-17 35 33 30 stats buildable @ 90% the cost of the current v-17m and 90% of the build time.
chassis 3 for the class will need to be researched on the prototype and this will unlock v-17 40 38 35 stats buildable @ 115% of the cost of the current V-17and  120% of the build time.

The main point here is taht even after the prototype has all 3 chassis researched, the user still has access to all 3 types and can build a customized fleet to best suit his resource stockpile - as is again typically Dominion in its versatile use of resources and raw material at hand.

**same logic need not be applied for all the classes. maybe just for the v-17 and maybe a cruiser**
** also please note do not feel that the math is to be 100%, it is merely an example to clarify a suggestion**

5. Dominion dreadnought needs to be part of the main dominion fleet tree. resource requirements for this ship are perfect.

6. Dominion support craft with refits for research as currently exists, but not so many. one ship that is similar in refit and flexibility to the generix.

These are my suggestions IMHO.

btw - Black baron;s points are great, it would be great  to see them integrated.

posted on March 11th, 2009, 8:49 pm

First off lete me say, i didnt read the whole post, ill come back to your ieas later today

but dont be saying that dominiom is the one not getting attention, its really the kligons and the feds, besides 2 or 3 new models, they got nothing, wheras dominion has a nice system, and some nice defenders, hyperspace artilery, and defense platforms, kligons and feds need the look at

although (from what i read) it looks like you put alot of thought into your ideas, which i support (i wished people responded to mine....) and ill be sure to come back later

however i do very much support your dreadnaught integration (they should bring the miranda 2 into the fleet for feds) and the defense platform, defense platform is one step closer to what i would like to see, as a smaller verision of a starbase, and theres not enough around, a dreadnaught would give more of a bit to the dominion which would be very nice

[runaway]

posted on March 11th, 2009, 9:50 pm

Last edited by runaway on March 11th, 2009, 9:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

so my opionion to your comments

1. here you right, with less moons it's just annoying just getting 25 supplies.

2. scarab? you mean the bug ship/attack destroyer? I think it is fine as it is, it takes time to build them but if you decrease the building time you can just pump out this ships en masse.
Here you have to manage your base to find the best solution between research of prototypes and building ships. Lower building time won't really help.

3. hmm never liked the perimeter. I don't know how often you can build it.

4. it's a pretty idea but it sounds a bit like the borg system. I mean there are many ships, but no one forces you to built all of them.You built those who are needed in your fleet. So in fact i see no difference between the situation as it is and the system you meantioned. Excpet by reducing the number of differnet ship models. Sounds montonic....flying with the same 3 ships over and over again.
By the way you first say managing the resources is hard...what isn't really that hard you say and now you wan't a more complicated ship building system....

5.I hate this ship...

6. you want a ship that is similar to the generix class....why?
You're playing the dominion there are not known for building support ships or any flexible ship models.
Rather they are a zero tolerance race with a unique ship design. They don't change their ship models/addons to get most efficiency like the devious romulans do.

[Anonymous]

posted on March 11th, 2009, 10:02 pm

Last edited by Anonymous on March 11th, 2009, 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

2. yes. fyi it's design is modeled directly on a scarab. refer memory-alpha
not necessarily - it's not always either slow or pump out.... a middle ground with a slight decrease of build time... as i described.

3. not that often.  hence the request. not a big fan of it myself. but it at least acts as some form of defense turret.

4. not exactly. ure merely upgrading chassis on the prototype and then building an upgraded version in the yard for better stats and of course higher costs and build time
and you still have the option to build the weaker one quicker and cheaper.

the borg dont work like this at all.

5. dang it!   

6. dont find the current cruisers for the Dominion other than the ship transport miniature SD to do much. was hoping we had one good cruiser for the dom like the feds have the akiras, the roms the generix, the klings the vorcha.

posted on March 11th, 2009, 10:35 pm

You can build a total of 3 Perimeter.  I usually either stick them all in my main resource cluster, near whatever moon has the ill-fate of becoming my supply bonanza, or I find a choke point and fill it with all three perimeter, and as many phaser turrets as I can afford.  I've found that if they aren't grouped, any force that is actually planning to attack isn't going to be more than annoyed by them, and they are such a late build that if you have them up, it's gonna be real attacks, not harrassment.

posted on March 11th, 2009, 11:53 pm

i will take a closer look at your suggestions and see what could be done in the future. i like some of them

However i must disappoint you: The Dreadnought will stay a mixed-tech unit but the other ideas sound interessting

[Anonymous]

posted on March 12th, 2009, 2:43 am

Last edited by Anonymous on March 12th, 2009, 2:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

we'll take what we get lol 

thanks Optec.

posted on March 12th, 2009, 3:18 am

the idea of configuring stations to produce one kind of ship sound like a very good idea.

posted on March 12th, 2009, 11:47 pm

Does the AI receive additional supplies/ressources?

A Dom AI Hard just killed:

14 spheres
4 cubes

so I was wondering.

How the hell do they get their money.

posted on March 12th, 2009, 11:52 pm

They don't use resources/supplies. That's how