Dominion Strategy

posted on April 11th, 2009, 8:30 pm

It works with the Feds, 'cause you can get to free ships quicker!

posted on April 11th, 2009, 9:58 pm

Wrong again. Eventhough the feds do get free ships, they are in no way strong enough on their own to defend against a rush, not to mention that you need a few buildings b4 that station actually unlocks, all of which are not cheap and of course the cooldown time of the actual warpin special is considrable as well.
Think of it this way, if I was any other race and I decided Im gonna rush you. Id build a group of my destroyers and send them to your base, by that time you maybe would get 4 free ships to defend against that, they would die and you'd watch your minings get owned. No need for me to attack your actual base, mind you, just keeping you in check for some time will do so much damage, you will not recover.
This problem would be even more apperant if you would be fighting Klingons or Romulans because of their cloaked scouts. They would see you're strategy and they would just hit-and-run your base time and time again for so long you might not even get to build that free ship pez dispeser.

Again guys, I dont mean to be rude, I'm just stating facts so you wont be suprised when you come up against a good opponent. I used to play A LOT of competitive FO with guys like Mark, Dan, Sfera, Hypercube, Adil, Jan, etc etc. And believe me those are all pros at FO (even if you dont know half of them ), I wasnt half bad myself, though my game probably did drop a lot since then, since I just play FO for fun against AIs nowadays. But make no mistake, I still remember every trick in the book and I can guarantee that, as is with every RTS, the early game strategy is THE most important part of every game. If the enemy will get you "in the corner" early-game, you're gonna loose and that is a fact.
Not that I mean to scare anybody of playing MP, that is certainly not my point. Its just, right at the beginning you MUST (in every game) build at least 5-8 destroyers and those will act as a deterrant and if you wish you can harrass your enemy with them. After that the strategy is up to you, but I suggest teching up moderatly (you wont be making easy on yourself if your gonna just build Sovies all game long, the enemy will just outnumber you 5:1 and your gonna loose - and then we get threads in here that Sovies are underpowered  ).
If you're not very good at microing units and general strategy and your intent on spamming one ship class, I suggest you spam the cruisers of each race. That would make you a decent opponent, since its a lot harder to kill 10 Akiras than it is to kill 3 Sovies

posted on April 11th, 2009, 10:31 pm

Damn Stright Baron 

posted on April 12th, 2009, 5:48 am

barron although i agree, as dominion spamming V-13s and putting them on high spical wepons atonomy will make a mighty task force. spamming bigs ships can be an effictive stratagy.
providing you can afford it

posted on April 12th, 2009, 7:30 am

barron although i agree, as dominion spamming V-13s and putting them on high spical wepons atonomy will make a mighty task force. spamming bigs ships can be an effictive stratagy.
providing you can afford it

Emmm just read my post again. Now tell me, would you be able to get to V-13s b4 a romulan or klingon player has 5 rhienns/bops? I didnt think so.
So what will a smart player do with those ships, he will ofc have a scout cloaked in your base, so he will see everything your doing. Because of this you will NOT be able to expand anywhere, he will keep you in check, while he would be building new ships and sending them to your base. Because you would see your pretty fucked u'd start building destroyers and try to fight off the enemy, but there is no way you would succeed as he has started building ships faster, has a whole lot more resources and knows exactly what are you doing.
In a game like this you would hang around just long enough that the enemy gets ships capable of easily destroying a starbase, so vorchas and chargs or the arties in case of the klingons. Mind you that those are available from the 2nd or 1st yard, now tell me how long you would last?
You wouldn't get anywhere near the V-13s or the second yard, u'd be lucky to have the first research intact. Oh and BTW, this is even more apperant with the Dominion as their supply stations and miners are VERY expensive, and loosing those in the beginning of the game is a real bitch.

posted on April 12th, 2009, 12:52 pm

thats true, we already experienced that the Dominion economy is a bit instable, we have some idea to solve that, but that will have to wait for a future feature, as we require some new stuff for it. The Dominion is not the easiest race to get started with, thats sure, but i think once you found your line through their unique gameplay, you are already close to master them, so its more like "hard to learn, but then easy to master", while other races are more beginner friendly, like the Klingons, but its much harder for them to react and control a "professional" game, so they should belong closer on the corner of "easy to learn, hard to master". We certainly aimed for that, as we want the races to be as individual as possible, but of course its hard to keep the balance between such quite different gameplay concepts. At the moment we are quite pleased with the lineup, however the next patch will feature a larger series of balancing changes just to adjust the current balancing and react to the communities feedback

posted on April 12th, 2009, 4:38 pm

all's fair enough said.

Just one point though. Strategy lies in troop movements, using terrain to your advantage, and specifically utilizing flanks to pin or overstretch opponents.

For my part at playing FO (and even A2... not so much A1 as the resource management was more simple), all I am able to primarily see is having to manage several resources to get good ships. primary concerns stemming from issues like enough supply or too much dilithium.

Selecting ships in an example where an intrepid is pretty much useless and fed players go for sabres then akiras and excelsors and then manage resources is not strategy.
It is certainly relevant to planning and management strategy, but not war strategy.

Strategy comes into play where we see players using rhienns to hit mining from the flank or lures ships out to one end of the front while launching a counter at the other end.

At this time FO like A2 has minimized the role of tactics and strategy and over-emphasized resource management which IMO is a detraction from the concept of real time STRATEGY.

IMO the dilithium moons and tritanium moons should be there to maintain production of ships, and not the basis or necessity to actually start building to begin with.
Think of it this way - to actually get your tech tree growing and enough miners out the door for just 2 or 4 moons - let alone the expansion part of it - you end up having little to nothing to actually build - even a set of BOps or Scubes or sabres.
it is here that the entire concept of a rush actually has relevance - where if you can stifle a player's initial internal development by simply rushing and killing construction ships and mners the game ends in a jiffy.
and in cases like the borg where u build slow and initial ships like the assimilator or scube are weak in defense (meaning although it can inflict damage it cant take it), you end up needing to keep fleets bunched. When such fleets are as it is limited in numbers, lure and hit tactics can easily overstretch the brg just between the 2 sides of its own base!
if we are focusing on fewer vessels for the borg as initially conceptualized, then the stand-alone or stand in few numbers defense of those ships should also be addressed so as to enable real stand alone ships in smaller numbers.

The same limitations exist  for the other races - example the dominion bug builds slowly costs a bit, and in the end does nothing. Bugs should be spammed - weak and cheap but able to come at you in large numbers.. not having strong offense or weak defense..which in of itself is self negating.
Another example - The feds have nothing capable to defend against a rhienn rush early on. Sabres are cannon fodder, and akiras are a little late. Intrepids are weak, and would make Janeway cry.

While the game is certainly a challenge, it appears to have become a challenge at resource management and selecting good ships PRIMARILY. And in doing this, has minimized the emphasis on actual strategy.

posted on April 12th, 2009, 5:19 pm

yeah your very right serpicus, the feds dont really have alot of early defense, the intrepid especially, dosent last very long in a battle

back to the dominion, although i havevnt played them alot, i like them, there ability to use contstruction as mining is awsome........ and there ships.......... i only find a few usefull, theres one that just fires torpedos that i can never get to work

posted on April 12th, 2009, 5:36 pm

serpicus: I dont want to take anything away from your post but this is a thread about the Dominion strategy.

Now about your complaints, I can see what you mean about the strategy part, but the FO is limited by the A2 game-engine which is a "old-school" type of RTS (think AoE, Warcraft, Starcraft, Red Alert,...) so there is really nothing they can do about the game mechanics, short of changing the actual game-engine. If you want a really tactical RTS check out Company of Heroes or the new Dawn of War II, games which I absolutely adore

Now about fed early game. They have 3 ships available: Sabre, Monsoon, Intrepid

-Sabre: Very good at harrassing with long range and good speed with the special weapon. Its not ment as a primary ship, but a support ship, a role in which is excells.

-Monsoon: Your primary anti-destroyer destroyer (:D) for the feds and a ship you and ray conveniently forgot to mention. Its weapons are strong (as is its special weapon) and its shields are very durable. One of the few destroyers ingame that is really usefull even in latter stages of the match due to its high defence value. This is a ship which can stand against any other destroyer in the game atm.

-Intrepid: If you think the Intrepid is bad against the destroyers, you should try out the Dominion Escort cruiser . The only problem is that those 2 ships arent ment to fight destroyers. With torps as main weapons for the both of them, their targets are bigger ships - and they can cause a dent on them

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on April 12th, 2009, 5:45 pm

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on April 12th, 2009, 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sorry to put this in a Dominion Thread... as this really should be for another... but 

Just one point though. Strategy lies in troop movements, using terrain to your advantage, and specifically utilizing flanks to pin or overstretch opponents.

Strategy also involves not overextending your supply lines, knowing what units to counter which, and using the special abilities. It is not all about using terrain—otherwise I suggest just making a map where you don’t have ANY bases, just units. Then you can go and outmaneuver your enemy all you want. However, that takes out the fun of being better at keeping track of everything at once—resources, support ships, damaged ships.

For my part at playing FO (and even A2... not so much A1 as the resource management was more simple), all I am able to primarily see is having to manage several resources to get good ships. primary concerns stemming from issues like enough supply or too much dilithium.

I think this really lies in the fact that you play Borg, where your particular main strategy seems to be to build up enough assimilators to get to spheres, instead of teching up the old fashioned way (through research, or even building the tech facility to get slicers etc). For assimilate avatar, the Borg just do not require the same sort of gameplay that the other races do: you CAN just get away with mindlessly building because they don’t rely much on support units and they have huge defensive and offensive power, so no microing ships into and out of battle really.

Selecting ships in an example where an intrepid is pretty much useless and fed players go for sabres then akiras and excelsors and then manage resources is not strategy.
It is certainly relevant to planning and management strategy, but not war strategy.

Again, I think this comes from your experience as Borg. Really, Fleet Operations is more about maintaining a balanced fleet and using each ship to the advantage then merely terrain advantages. In this case the Borg is much more suited to terrain than any other race: a lot of the maps have nebulae that shut down shields and sensors, which is obviously beneficial to a race like the Borg. Relatively few maps have shield regenerating nebulas. Nonetheless, most players consider it “cheap” when the opposing player uses nebulae or back entrances to bases to secure a footheld—especially when they are more beneficial for one race than another. Lastly, when you say “fed players go for sabres then akiras and excelsors”, I hear, fed players micro sabres out of range and use the akiras defensive ability one at a time while using canaverals to blackout the enemies firepower at key moments. This is just a matter of perspective though as when you say this: “Strategy comes into play where we see players using rhienns to hit mining from the flank or lures ships out to one end of the front while launching a counter at the other end” you don’t mention using support ships, just the movement of the ships. I don’t think this is a fair overview of strategy.

IMO the dilithium moons and tritanium moons should be there to maintain production of ships, and not the basis or necessity to actually start building to begin with.

You can always try playing on double or unlimited resources if you’d like: then you can just pump out ships at the beginning. However, most players will not do this because it minimizes the role of management: it is simply not fun to get 10 SCubes in your base in the first 3 minutes simply because the Borg can build nearly instantly, compared to, say, Klingons. Likewise, teching up immediately would become infinitely more affordable, and thus decrease the role of ALL early game ships (I can imagine it now, you build 5 construction ships and within the first 4 minutes of the game you have every single research facility and shipyard built—not fun).

Think of it this way - to actually get your tech tree growing and enough miners out the door for just 2 or 4 moons - let alone the expansion part of it - you end up having little to nothing to actually build - even a set of BOps or Scubes or sabres.
Again, refer to above.

it is here that the entire concept of a rush actually has relevance - where if you can stifle a player's initial internal development by simply rushing and killing construction ships and mners the game ends in a jiffy.
and in cases like the borg where u build slow and initial ships like the assimilator or scube are weak in defense (meaning although it can inflict damage it cant take it), you end up needing to keep fleets bunched. When such fleets are as it is limited in numbers, lure and hit tactics can easily overstretch the brg just between the 2 sides of its own base!
if we are focusing on fewer vessels for the borg as initially conceptualized, then the stand-alone or stand in few numbers defense of those ships should also be addressed so as to enable real stand alone ships in smaller numbers.
Not sure what you mean by weak defense: all their ships can take quite a pounding, you just have to pay attention to what type of ships you want to take out first (of your opponent). For instance, as this example is the freshest, when I sent support Generix and Rhienn refits against your base, you targeted the Rhienns pretty much exclusively, rather than taking out the Generixs which were crippling your firepower.

The same limitations exist  for the other races - example the dominion bug builds slowly costs a bit, and in the end does nothing. Bugs should be spammed - weak and cheap but able to come at you in large numbers.. not having strong offense or weak defense..which in of itself is self negating.

I think this is primarily the Dominion’s problem, as I had no trouble defeating your Borg rush yesterday with Romulans. However, this is going to be fixed next patch, so no worries.

Another example - The feds have nothing capable to defend against a rhienn rush early on. Sabres are cannon fodder, and akiras are a little late. Intrepids are weak, and would make Janeway cry.

I disagree with this. If you play Mayson, you can just use the Norway’s ability. Depending on how quickly they come at you, you will not only have numerical superiority because Sabres are cheaper and build faster, but you will have the advantage of speed and 360 fire: Sabres outrun Rhienn’s and can kill them while retreating. If you play the other avatar (sorry forgot the name) you can build monsoons which are very good at eliminating destroyers with their special.

While the game is certainly a challenge, it appears to have become a challenge at resource management and selecting good ships PRIMARILY. And in doing this, has minimized the emphasis on actual strategy.

I’m not sure what you mean by selecting good ships. You have to select good ships and then use them properly. I remember a battle I had months ago when one player used 30-40 Excelsior II’s against my balanced fleet of Norexans, Generix support, Generix frigate, and Rhienn. Were those Excelsiors good? Yes. Were they well used. No. Most ships have a use in Fleet Ops; it is not just about choosing “the best one” but choosing “the best one for the situation and using it correctly”. I could argue that Norways are very very good. But if I use them against Sovereigns, they’ll get creamed. Likewise, I could argue that Tactical Cubes are very good: however, if I use them against Veqlarg’s the TacCube(s) will get annihilated. I believe—and I don’t mean offense by this—that you are getting disillusioned by strictly playing the Borg and not changing avatars or strategies. You might argue that “hey, you do what works”… but if I did that each time I played, I’d never learn new things. It might mean I get defeated quite a bit, but in the end I will understand those tactics and be able to anticipate them when they are used against me too

posted on April 12th, 2009, 7:12 pm

@serpicus: as baron said, this is an old-school rts like starcraft. it's more about micro ur units while building ur economy , teching & producing ships. please don't turn this into another 'the feds r weak' thread.

@The Black Baron: nice to see a Relic fan . all ur points r valid & i mostly agree with u. one thing though: fast warpin & skipping tier 1 (sabers) for the feds is a strategy that can work

@Dominus_Noctis: please, oh please use 'quote' in ur comments

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on April 12th, 2009, 7:26 pm

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on April 12th, 2009, 7:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sorry, it just takes about 10 times as long to use the quote option because as soon as the post reaches down 5 lines something weird happens with the text box in my browser and I can't type without it pushing my cursor back up to the top of the screen; I have to use Word for everything. I'll make an exception and do it though... just for you 

Wow this IS irritating 
Edit: is that better? 

posted on April 12th, 2009, 8:14 pm

Please discuss the overall feel of strategy in FO in a seperate thread.

Serpicus is right that that some strategical or rather tactical features are underrepresented in that game, but this occurs in nearly every game. Relevance of terrain is one of these points. The exchange of maps is just needed to alter starting and moon positions. That is truely a pity.

The fact, that it is not necessay to balance fleets with the borg is a pity too - on the other hand it IS the borg, that doesn't care for individuality. For all other races fleet tactics certainly DO play a major role. This is especially true for the heavily nerfed (I don't claim that this was bad) romulans.

Concerning ships that are not used too often ... I'll open a new thread now.

Concerning the dominion I still believe the bug is too costy, too slow in building. I also can't handle it's recource management well, so I'd appreciate some game opening strategies here.

posted on April 12th, 2009, 8:17 pm

@serpicus: as baron said, this is an old-school rts like starcraft. it's more about micro ur units while building ur economy , teching & producing ships. please don't turn this into another 'the feds r weak' thread.

. i didnt say the feds are weak. i dont even like the feds.  I believe Dom and Baron got the point of my post. But I do apologize for intermingling my points with the Dom strategy thread.

So ill leave furthering this for another thread

posted on April 12th, 2009, 8:26 pm

serpicus: I dont want to take anything away from your post but this is a thread about the Dominion strategy.


-Intrepid: If you think the Intrepid is bad against the destroyers, you should try out the Dominion Escort cruiser . The only problem is that those 2 ships arent ment to fight destroyers. With torps as main weapons for the both of them, their targets are bigger ships - and they can cause a dent on them

yup. more to the point, the Dominion escort is pretty bad. lol.

but in all fairness however, when defining strategy for the dominion, as we see happening time and again we are discussing each vessel;s role in the fleet, which I agree with you - monsoon, sabre, intrepid we have a plethora of them, and each most certainly does fulfil its role.

Dom too pointed out some excellent examples.

However, what I was trying to say is that when we are posting about Dominion strategy, the current implementation of Jem scarab spam adn bomber ineffectiveness (which i disagre with, the bombers cn screw up assimilators and rhienn pretty bad) is a side point.
We find the current scarabs ineffective due to the limitation inherent in the resource structure of the side.

It is this problem of resource overemphasis that is the core of what I was referring to.
So when speaking of strategy we need to realize that while teh ships in the current dominion structure may need a few special weapons tweaks etc, the main problem we face i due to the resource requirement to build the early jem ships. Their current strenghts and weaknesses as well as the Dominion style of gameplay as Baron himself described is quite canon.
The resource micro-management early in game for the Dominion as well as teh other races is what I see as the root cause of our discussion.