By Mark L. Compton
How I’ve been writing articles for Continuing Missions for over a year now and forgot this jewel is beyond me. Star Trek: Dominion Wars (2001) was one of the first Star Trek games I played after Starfleet Command. Then along comes Jon Allen on the Star Trek Adventures Facebook page asking if anyone had written this beauty up. Thank you Jon for reminding me how much I love this beast, and inspiring me to draft it. It also gave me a chance to use my newly acquired Utopia Planitia Sourcebook to build the frame. I hope I did it justice.
Of course one of my biggest complaints about most Star Trek video games is that they are very combat-heavy. This is a concept I feel gets away from the heart of what Star Trek is supposed to be. But, when you want to sit down and as Captain Sulu says in Starfleet Command “Now, let’s blow something up” (Still my favorite line from any Star Trek game), Dominion Wars is up there in my top three (Starfleet Command and Away Team being the other two).
The game basically made you a Fleet Captain of up to six ships. It gave you the ability to build your fleet, assign commanding officers to those ships and then, as the name implies, go off and fight the Dominion. You had the ability to customize your crew for each ship and hopefully, if the game didn’t glitch or crash (one of the few complaints) or lose your saved game, you could get lost for hours playing. If you didn’t want to play the preassigned missions, there was the online option that allowed you to get into death matches, or team up with friends to fight other less suspecting enemies.
The Achilles class was one of seven original designs created for the game, one for each faction. This was my favorite ship of the game, mainly because it was one of the few that had what I’ve felt most starships are missing, a descent broadside option. For those asking, a broadside is pretty much what it sounds like, the ability to fire a large amount of ordinance either port or starboard of the ship’s centerline. Sure, you can do this with any starship with phasers, but until the Achilles, there was never a ship that could unload torpedoes in the same manner. Pair this ship with a couple of good support vessels, Defiant or Intrepid-class, and they could tear through some heavy enemy engagements. Anyone who knows anything about naval (and therefore space combat in a 2-d environment) is that being able to field a strong broadside attack is essential to any engagement.
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A good write up of this class. And you are correct that combat is a significant part of a lot of games. I’d prefer a Mass Effect style Star Trek game (for the roleplaying story), but I digress.
As I am running six months after the Dominion War, Starfleet ( and most other major powers) are really not in a condition to casually start shooting, but would advertise the Achilles-Class as a very big stick that could show up and ….discourage piracy and other shenanigan’s by minor powers that get ideas and show Starfleet has a much reduced sense of humor on the subject. Post Dominion War, It’s ramp up time from peaceful negotiation to ‘F*** around and Find Out” is considerably less as they have fewer officers and crews to lose.
So far, the players of my game have been smart enough to get out of situations requiring shooting, but they have also not been above describing what would happen if they call for larger backup.
Cold War style tensions and such.