Dominion Wars Retrospective 

4:50 you just described modern Star trek.

I bought this game when I was a kid. But I remember it always crashed very early into the game, and kid me don't know how to fix it. So it's possible that the problem wasn't limit to modern PC

I do remember stacking phaser upgrades on my galaxys snd watching things die across the map.

Mate thank goodness you have reviewed this. No decent reviews anywhere on RU-vid! I loved this game but I can’t get it to run anywhere now. It’s intro was brilliant too. I was mesmerised as a kid.

I remember both loving and hating this game lol

I could not get this game to play on my PC no matter what I did or had modified. This was one of the games that led me to pivot back from PC to console-based platforms because I was sick and tired of having to upgrade my PC with each new title. That being said, the Starfleet Command games, particularly SFC 2 was the best and played well.

I'm not experienced with modding, I tried a couple of things to get this working on newer hardware but could never get it up and running. I loved this game back in the day,

One of those games at the time I just dropped, as my young teen self just lost interest due to its quirks. I think it was all a sign of Activision just making too many Star Trek games in a compressed time period, and some suffered getting pushed out unfinished. I enjoyed Armada much more.

I liked this a lot in high school (When it was new.) Its on my top three most wanted not currently available digitally Star Trek games. I loved Federation Alliance fifth mission and always felt it was something that should have happened in the series. Fortunately I never had problems with the catch the enemy mission type because I prefer swarms of small or midsized ships to a few heavy ships if at all reasonable.

The only workaround you would have for that janky save system, would be to save just *before* you complete the final objective of each mission, so you can then access the next one easily. But nobody would bother doing that, unless they wanted this specific workaround in order to tailor their build for each mission. Not to mention that must only make things even more intensive for hardware, and no doubt the game would probably crash often upon loading one of those mission-end saves. All in all, as you implied, it just seems pretty ridiculous!

Yeah this game was such a disappointment back in the day, especially right off the heels of Starfleet Command and Star Trek Armada which did the fleet battle concept way better in their own distinct ways. Ironically I had way too much fun setting up the fleets before battles than the actual battles themselves. I always felt picking the captain and crew was a system that needed to be carried over to Starfleet Command. It's worth noting that, from what little research I could find from over a decade ago, the game actually was released unfinished. It was a nightmare to get to run even on windows 98, I remember it constantly crashing when I got it on launch and it might very well be the game that actually made me learn that programs can just crash. It's worth noting that there were patches to the game that fixed quite a few issues and even added a bunch of new missions, a Skirmish mode, added a bunch of multiplayer stuff, and even a little Maquis campaign.

Great review. I have not come across this particular game. A lot of old Star Trek games have fallen into lost media and only the fans who played them can keep their memory alive now. Thank you for sharing it. I grew up with a lot of the old Star Trek games, and have a soft spot for the Elite Force series which upon replaying has no right to be as good as I remember. I would have been interested to hear about the story for Dominion Wars as I will probably never play it. I understand wanting to avoid spoilers, perhaps a spoiler warning and a time stamp for viewers to jump to if they want to avoid that kind of thing? Anyway, great work mate, you’ve earns a sub!

I managed to get DWars running on my XP, but it requires an older graphics card and the second-to-last patch released. I agree with this game being a mixed bag, and had the license not been nearing expiration thus the title being rushed out, additional time and testing would've had DWars be a title to rival SFC (maybe). One more thing: there was a site that had a mission creator available for download, however that site and said creator are unfortunately no longer in existence. Would love to find that mission creator again, but such is life.

This is one I never played. I don't think this game was in stores very long, and the pretty universal bad reviews meant I was never motivated to get a copy later. The Simon and Schuster games usually had cool concepts but were technically nightmares to get running reliable. For example, their TNG Interactive Technical Manual relied on having a specific version of Apple QuickTime installed on your machine, and if you upgraded, it would not work reliably. However, an idea for a follow-up: Starship Creator Warp II (the version released in 2000) supposedly had the ability to export your custom ships for use in Dominion Wars. Might be fun to see some cursed creations fly into battle. That is, if you’re willing to put up with the frustration of getting it running. Starship Creator won’t install on 64 bit windows and has a ton of other compatibility issues with Windows XP onwards. Probably similar to the problems you had running Dominion Wars.

I had this game and tried to play the Fed campaign...I could not get past the mission where you had to disable 5 Cardi ships and beam off a spy... Could not get the transporters to work to get them off the ship. Other than that, it was a fun game.

I tried 3 times on 3 diffrent operating systems to get this to work. I have never actually played more than a mission, it crashed every time.

I remember having this game when I was 12-13, I remember enjoying it, but I gotta agree with the map being horrible, I’m a little disappointed there isn’t a modding community that has made some UI improvement

Ah yes, I tried streaming this old POS running on Win10 recently. I managed to do it, but god was it a mess. Main issue was the slowdown that built up with every mission, getting to the point where frametimes measured in the seconds. Oh, and don't forget the Starship Creator tie in - design your own ship and import them into DW to fight with them! Except it was missing several components, so you could import your ship, and it would have no nacelles in DW.

Using PCEM of 86Box would make running this much easier.

Now you MUST play klingon Academy AFTER you watch star trek the undiscovered country

Btw the creators of the game NAILED the vfx. Dwars failed because it was a rushed release.

0:06 "Star Wars Dominion Wars"?! 😂

How on Earth did you get it running??? I got a disc a few years ago & have never been able to get it running. I read ancient forums that even when new people struggled to get it to run.

great game but when it came out it was bug fest... 1 of 10 times it runned for longer then 10 minutes. also later got a patch that changed the game heavyli. but overall not a bad game.