Dominion's turn

posted on February 14th, 2012, 1:12 am

ok ok just wanted to put this out there. i feel like over the last 4-5 patches the other races have gotten little treats, like a new ship or a new ability or better stats etc.....but over all i feel like the dominion have had no new treats .....and reduced stats  ....when will the dominion get there time in the spotlight.....all i ever see is federation this federation that, borg this borg that, romulan this romulan that....in fact the only time i do get to read about the dominion is in the patch readme with info on something being reduced......please dev's hear my plea  .........ok i feel better now.....so .....anybody else have something to add

posted on February 14th, 2012, 1:33 am

In general it is much harder for us to add new units or new abilities to the Dominion's technology tree, pre-redo, without upsetting their balance. Nevertheless, you may recall that the B-8 was recently buffed . Klingons have also not received any changes, other than balance changes, for the past few patches  .

posted on February 14th, 2012, 1:35 am

posts about Dominion and Klingons would be nice.

The borg faction redo has been hinted or talked about quite a bit, even though I might not have specifics that come to mind so readily.

I wouldn't mind hearing next to nothing about either of these until very close to the release date though.

There is something to be said for seeing something first hand while playing. Not thinking over and over about it for weeks.

Some secrets can be a good thing, large secrets!

But yeah, some morsel of info, even if it isn't that big.

posted on February 14th, 2012, 2:03 am

I dunno, I like my morsels of info. I love the news posts about changes with the little teasers in them. The best part to me are the photo quality screenshots that accompany them! Something can be said for patience too though. 

posted on February 14th, 2012, 1:36 pm

Well the dom only have a minor early game and 1v1 problem, in larger games if they are left they are almost unbeatable by anyone when they are played by someone with practice. Other than fixing those issues and numbing them a bit in later game they don't need that much but im sure they are being redone in this new patch anyway.

posted on February 14th, 2012, 6:13 pm

Well, the drawback in early game is not that bad. Sure, you are at a disadvantage, if you want to put early pressure to the enemy, so your work is a little like "expand safely and build, build, build". While the klingons, feds and rommies can do early raidings, the dominion must defend their expansions.

But there is a certain critical point, where the dominion will get their efforts back through the cheaper ships with similar stats. And the dominion can put out a large yard pretty soon with powerful ships.

Against the AI I had no problems to counter-spam. Against a human, I will get problems, because I must defend my expansions.

But I think the dominion could need a bit more of spice in their gameplay. Like a ship, that is "equipped" with a founder, giving a good boost to nearby ships and a good defensive-bonus to the leading-ship itself.

Thus, the borg might use this also. But this is going into the main idea of "hero-ships" or "flag-ships" - so no new things from this side of my idea-framework

What I thought when playing dominion: The lack a bit of a descent anti-borg ability and are too anti-station focussed. Some anti-ship ships would be great in their lines. Maybe a bomber with a 100% hit-rate for a certain period of time?

[Tryptic]

posted on February 14th, 2012, 7:04 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on February 14th, 2012, 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The only problem I see with the Dominion right now is the fact that their ships all have strong counters.  For example, Bugs are an excellent early-game ship to bolster your fleet with, but they can never be built vs Borg or Romulan because these races have super hard-counters to it.  Bombers do extra damage to short, but ships like Rhienns, Sabers, and Dodes will counter them powerfully, etc.

With the reworking of "combat-support" ships in the next patch, Dominion should have a much kinder early game with their bugs and the general weakening of passives will make all their ships less extreme and easier to manage.  They won't really need a full redo to be playable after that.

posted on February 16th, 2012, 7:48 am

S2 spam will be tempered though, now that they're effectively blinded.

posted on February 16th, 2012, 8:48 am

Quite frankly I'm quite enjoying the little news updates .

  Seems like we've all been waiting for the Fed Redo to remedy sooooo many of the problems we've had in playing with them so it's only natural their news posts come first IMO .

  But I confess: I can't wait for the Klingons either

posted on February 16th, 2012, 10:32 am

  But I confess: I can't wait for the Klingons either

Imo the klingons are the only well conceived race in the game right now. All the other matchups tend to play out kinda retarded in 1v1 with lots of build order restictions, and "do-or-die's". (if you play online, you konw what i'm talking about)

Of course the changes on the other races will need some adjustments on the klingons for sure, but I don't think thats very necessary right now.

OFF:
One thing that bothers me, that even with these awesome redos, (I particularly love the rethinking of scouting, thats just purely awesome) the maps, and the maps system won't change anytime soon. I haven't played that much online lately, but I was thinking a lot about, how to make a better balanced/and more fun 1v1 map than Duel II, but I was facing  problems like: "if I move this natural expansion just 1 inches left/right or up/down, or change the distance from the main base, or just the change a little bit the layout of the moons, it will heavily favor this or that race..." 
Don't get me wrong, but I don't think that better balance will happen before the map system changes, it's just doesn't seem possible for me with 5 so radically different races. 

posted on February 16th, 2012, 1:36 pm

It'd be interesting if we just got rid of the Federation for one patch.  Then we'd have to have some other standard for balance.  And Star Trek favors the Feds too much, anyway.

posted on February 16th, 2012, 2:34 pm

Can you imagine how many new players would stop playing if they took out an entire faction for one patch? Plus it would make bringing them back in even harder.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the gameplay concepts of the Federation IMO, balancing is still basically down to tweaking numbers.

posted on February 16th, 2012, 6:12 pm

Yeah, it's pretty clear cut: Klingon faction is pure awesomeness.

Although, playing the Borg faction a bit more, and getting the hang of it, I'd say that manner of gameplay is pretty sweet too. I'm really starting to like it. You get bigger resource intake, a pretty unique feature. Incredibly strong hulls for all units and structures, aside from the mining station which is very weak, uplinks, and then dode while under construction to relay. Those are the three week spots. But everything else is decently good.

There is no tech tree. It's all by cc collection. The only thing I wonder if can be tweaked is a late game stage where you wait to get 130 ccs for cube. But then you are back to zero. So you have to wait at least for 50 for a sphere, because anything below is useless at that stage. So getting a could production of cubes and diamonds later on is so hard in my view because of waiting for cc to reaccumulate. But of course, the cube is so strong that even getting one out lets you do quite a bit of damage. It's just that its one ship, so on maps where you have multiple points to be, you can't stretch on ship out.

The battleships and such, above sphere, are very expensive. Your ships are like moving star bases, some easier to damage, and cubes that just are invincible. The two tac, three holding beam, and 1 torp is my current favourite cube.

Yeah, the only main downside I see is that I never want to build scubes, adaptors, and sometimes even assimilators. Cause I know they just aren't going to last. So I just save for spheres and above. Building dodes and the relays early on is the only defence, because it lasts throughout the whole game.

I've tried building fleets of scubes and adaptors... and it does do well against early ships, but then when the AI gets into late game and spamming large fleets, you lose it all so quickly. Even when you invade the AI in early-mid game, those scubes won't cut it against AI defences of turrets and SBs. So really, they are short  lived. And without a way to deconstruct them (or reconstruct them into later ships) they seem wasteful.

I think each of the races is actually pretty awesome. Klingons just have a slight edge. Miners to destroyers, constructor beam weapons, supply after kills, field yard expansion that don't tie up constructor, qawduj from station etc etc. just lots of neat tricks.

posted on February 16th, 2012, 6:35 pm

OFF:
One thing that bothers me, that even with these awesome redos, (I particularly love the rethinking of scouting, thats just purely awesome) the maps, and the maps system won't change anytime soon. I haven't played that much online lately, but I was thinking a lot about, how to make a better balanced/and more fun 1v1 map than Duel II, but I was facing  problems like: "if I move this natural expansion just 1 inches left/right or up/down, or change the distance from the main base, or just the change a little bit the layout of the moons, it will heavily favor this or that race..." 
Don't get me wrong, but I don't think that better balance will happen before the map system changes, it's just doesn't seem possible for me with 5 so radically different races. 

Don't be to sure that the current map system is here to stay...

posted on February 23rd, 2012, 4:30 am

.... It's just that its one ship, so on maps where you have multiple points to be, you can't stretch on ship out....

You see but, That one ships controlls the entire map. Either they are running from you and you can keep advancing, or there trying to kill you and you r retreating, either way, the cube controls the field, no matter how you look at it. Not one player that i know will choose to not react when a cube attacks them. Such a formidable prescence is a vital asset to borg late game.