Remembering Star Trek Dominion Wars

[@KertaDrake]

I remember basically becoming the pirate king of the Alpha Quadrant in this game. Every single ship was hijacked by me!

[@zooropa04]

Did I have Starship Creator Warp 2 and export every ship I made to Dominion Wars, despite knowing I'd probably never have it? You're damn right I did!

[@willlliamo]

Also you left out that you could make custom ships in ST ship creator and import them into DW. This was a extremely special back then

[@ASTheOneAndOnly]

Mate thank goodness you have reviewed this. No decent reviews anywhere on KZbin! 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.

[@azordash_games]

Glad you enjoyed it… Yes playability on anything vaguely modern is a nightmare. I thought Diakatana was a challenge, but this takes it to another level… The best feedback I can give for what worked for me which I didn’t find documented is; The installer & game need to be run as admin, the installer if not run in Admin will not copy ALL files although it will say that it did, causing it to crash on opening. The other thing is change your desktop resolution to 800x600 and disable the windows notification for non supported resolution - this popup causes the game to crash. Obviously this isn’t extensive, but these are some things that I found after hours… upon hours of trying to get it to work. Hope it helps if you end up trying 😊

[@jamesabernethy7896]

It's great finding a review or retrospective to a game that hardly anyone else either played at the time or remembers fondly if they did. I love this game and wish I could get it working.

[@azordash_games]

@@jamesabernethy7896 Glad you enjoyed the video...! Two things which I found enabled me to play the game but were not documented anywhere were... The installer & game need to be run as admin, the installer if not run in Admin will not copy ALL files although it will say that it did, causing it to crash on opening. Change your desktop resolution to 800x600 and disable the windows notification for non supported resolution - this popup causes the game to crash. Hopefully this might help you get it running!

[@s955120]

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

[@RetroAmateur1989]

4:50 you just described modern Star trek.

[@azordash_games]

Haha ok that made me LOL 😂

[@christianresel8051]

yea... STO is the canon timeline, deal with it folks question WHO made the ORDER to actualy MAKE STO, then think again. What they did with Discovery was totaly destroy Trek Lore and do something shitty themself (they totaly forgot that archer's time ended basicaly IN the constitution and miranda class, discovery try's to tell us that there was something in between those things... yea right, it was the earth - romulan war and the first federation - klingon war! NOT MUCH TIME FOR ANYTHING!). Picard is the same... Picard might be after the kelvin timeline killed ANYTHING RESEMBLING TREK, but not in the OG universe. Same as Chakotey being alive... his DEATH made Seven QUIT starfleet, nothing else! A shitty class like seen in prodegy is also OFF THE TABLE. Federation would NEVER build something like this safe for a WAR! That was no exploration ship or anything, it was a shitty "lets make a children show" that they tried to salvage with Janeway and the Sovereign herself jumping in... nice try, didnt work.

[@trazyntheinfinite9895]

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

[@azordash_games]

I never actually worked out if the devices stack properly… I guess they do then!

[@jamesabernethy7896]

I probably did something similar, my gameplay usually involved smaller fleets of very powerful units. What I remember doing was capturing as many Cardassian Tonga's as I could. They felt like such an effective ship.

[@Tuskin38]

This game also supported importing ships you could create in another game ‘Starship Creator 2’. I never owned both at the same time so I can’t really comment on how it worked, I just knew about it. Here I ago mentioning Star Trek online again, but they just added the Achilles class from this game lol

[@tra-viskaiser8737]

I remember finally finding the version it would work with by 2003 or so. I only used it a few times, and basically just upgraded my galaxy fleet. This game would be great with extra ships added in..

[@user-yf3cr5ev5p]

I had both and now I vaguely remember that being advertised but I have no memory of actually doing that. I don't know why. I always wanted to play the starships I created in that game, but Starship Creator was pretty lame really. ST Online does the ship customization far better, but I wish even then there were more options.

[@blacktronpavel]

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.

[@azordash_games]

I hear you…. Though to be fair this was a bit of a nightmare playability wise on any hardware.

[@Zeithri]

I've wanted to play this game but I.. just haven't gotten around to it. I love that Star Trek Online recreated this and the other old ST-PC game intros with the introduction of several old ships into the STO universe ^^

[@CaptainMojo]

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.

[@CaptainMojo]

And I wonder if these would run any better natively in Windows 98/ME? I keep harping on VMs for retro gaming, but most modern VM software like VirtualBox or VMware won’t support Win9X guests. However, there’s software called PCem that is meant to emulate PCs from the late 80’s to early 00’s (basically 386->Pentium II era) that works great for this, and supports fully virtualized 3d and sound acceleration hardware like Sound Blasters and Voodoo graphics accelerators. It takes a little effort to configure, but if you’re ever stuck trying to get some of these older games to work, check it out.

[@azordash_games]

Interesting you mention PCem, I kind of went down that rabbit hole when trying to get this to work. While the project concept looks really cool, in my opinion the documentation is not great, and I couldn't get it in a working with Dominion Wars without errors. Certainly not a criticism of PCem, I may have lacked the technical skill. In the end I ended up mashing together a whole lot of work arounds to try and get the game stable, however, performance in some of the busy segments went down to 3-4fps which I was never able to solve, and made editing this video to look half decent to the viewer a challenge. I did see the Starship Creator tie in, and was going to explore it... however, given the technical challenges I had with DW I decided against it :D I'm on to Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza next... hopefully that plays nicer with modern hardware, or at least my XP machine (which according to the box it does!).

[@Togorian_Jedi]

Thank you! Star Trek: Dominion Wars is amazing. DW is completely different from Star Wars: Starfighter.

[@brav0wing]

This was a fantastic game!

[@willlliamo]

I remember this game was impossibly buggy on launch and i needed to download a patch from day one

[@Daimo83]

Always wanted to play this, I even bought a copy from ebay a few years ago. Never got it to work though. I guess a PCEM virtual machine with state saving could fix the issue with not being able to save at the fleet screen.

[@jamesabernethy7896]

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,

[@user-yf3cr5ev5p]

I had this game and it was ok. But I couldn't play it beyond Windows 98. Even back then I think I had issues with it running. Maybe after I got a dedicated graphics card it ran. The highlight was definitely having the show's actors reprise their roles in the voice acting. The opening cinematic was pretty cool.

[@mosser-wm3dx]

I remember both loving and hating this game lol

[@roguerifter9724]

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.

[@azordash_games]

I won’t lie, part of my larger smaller amount of ship strategy was due to the frame rate on this playthrough! I’d love to know the other 2 wanted unavailable games? I’m slowly going through my old box copies, so curious to see if I have them!

[@roguerifter9724]

@@azordash_games Klingon Academy and Birth of the Federation.

[@azordash_games]

@roguerifter9724 I have both! I remember BOTF slowing down majorly on original hardware once you reached turn 120-130 so it will be interesting to see how that manifests itself on modern hardware.

[@Redem10]

I remember getting this when I bought the fallen...I was able to play it a few minutes then it would crash my pc

[@NineWorldsFromDrew]

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!

[@azordash_games]

Agreed… the worst bit is it actually just dumps the save files in the base directory… no SAVE folder or anything… just the save files alongside your .exe’s 🫠

[@BaconGold790]

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!

[@azordash_games]

Cheers for the super kind words! I’ve got a few other older games in my physical collection I’ll be covering in the future so you might see some other surprises. Totally appreciate the feedback on the story… while I generally try to avoid spoilers for people wanting to go back and play these games, the technical chance of this happening with Dominion Wars is unlikely. Great suggestion on the time stamp option and I’ll give it some thought as to how I can improve in the future.

[@jamesabernethy7896]

This was a great game, I did so many play-throughs. I really like both Elite Force games but people never seem to mention Klingon Honour Guard. Starfleet Academy would have come out at similar time. That was on 5 discs and came in one of those large display boxes.

[@azordash_games]

@@jamesabernethy7896 I think you mean Klingon Academy and it's huge 5CD box :) Klingon Honor Guard was on 2 CD's.

[@jamesabernethy7896]

@@azordash_games yes, honour guard was 2 cd’s but the Starfleet Academy was on 5. I never got Klingon academy, at the time as I was trying to save up

[@azordash_games]

Oh my mistake I read that wrong :) I never had Starfleet Academy… need to also track it down one day. I have heard good things about it.

[@joestewart6027]

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.

[@azordash_games]

I know the exact one and it was not easy… especially when I was playing it at about 4-5fps

[@jonathanchadwell6263]

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.

[@azordash_games]

Oh a mission creator would have been good. I actually have no idea which patch I used in the end to get it running, I think I literally downloaded all of them.

[@UndyingNephalim]

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.

[@VieVentar]

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.

[@azordash_games]

That’s unfortunate about the Starship creator… I never had that so I couldn’t test. Yeah of the 10 or so hours footage I collected for this video I literally had about 3 hours of non slideshow footage. The greatest irony is that due to some of the other design choices, it doesn’t actually make the game more difficult in my opinion.

[@KiltedCritic]

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.

[@Lesserthannone]

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.

[@azordash_games]

I can certainly relate 🫠

[@xxnoxx-xp5bl]

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

[@davepowers3194]

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

[@azordash_games]

I agree... I think it was a case of having other games which have a bit of a bigger scope (Armada, SFC etc) with a bigger following... not to mention the tech challenges on modern systems. From what I understand you could actually import your own custom ships with Starship Creator, however, I never had access to this.

[@trazyntheinfinite9895]

​@@azordash_gamesyou could not, had both, never worked.

[@davepowers3194]

@@azordash_games yeah, I got mine bundled with Starship Creator, I never did end up importing any of my ships, but now I suddenly really want to track down both and relive some old memories haha

[@azordash_games]

Just be prepared to relive those memories at 4 to 5 fps unless you have a native Win9X machine handy 🫠

[@davepowers3194]

@@azordash_games oh I know it’s gonna be a project unto itself

[@trazyntheinfinite9895]

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

[@azordash_games]

Yeah I have a feeling that with the show ending pretty much 2 years to the day of release that time pressure was certainly an issue...

[@trazyntheinfinite9895]

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

[@azordash_games]

I 100% will be creating a video on this! Definitely in my top 5 Trek games.

[@athcnv]

(cough) BRIDGE COMMANDER (cough) 😮😇 (though you might want to use a mod. It's been a while but I used to have a mod that could change the torpedo reload time. I set it to 5 seconds. 😈 Otherwise Federation ships had a firepower disadvantage cos beams in this game took too long to deal damage compared to bolts. 🤔)

[@azordash_games]

I’ll definitely get to Bridge Commander… anything to listen to Patrick Stewart’s voice for a few hours!

[@athcnv]

@@azordash_games do remember to press back space to skip those bits.... 😐 (I'm kidding.... 😉😋😆😁😇 Although I did waste a lot of time failing to speed up cutscenes I'd already watched.... 😳😅)

[@iainfreeman5112]

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.

[@azordash_games]

Yeah it definitely was not easy... I put a lot of time into getting this game working to a state that I could capture footage, and even then encountered issues. Two things which I found out myself by trial and error which I did *not* see mentioned online were: (Running Win 11) The installer & game need to be run as admin, the installer if not run in Admin will not copy ALL files although it will say that it did, causing it to crash on opening. Change your desktop resolution to 800x600 and disable the windows notification for non supported resolution - this popup causes the game to crash. Just be prepared if you do get it to run, some missions will be 5-7fps at times with lots of on screen activity, which I never found a way to fix. I tried to cut most of these parts from my footage.

[@TadeoDOria]

0:06 "Star Wars Dominion Wars"?! 😂

[@azordash_games]

ahahaha omg, I don't know how I (or the comment police) didn't pick up on that sooner. Well done for paying attention :D

[@TadeoDOria]

@@azordash_games Happens to the best of us lol

[@gameoverinsertcointocontin8102]

It never got good reviews and as far I remember I don't think I ever saw a single copy in retail shelves

[@dannyhartwig7595]

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.

[@lunchbox7737]

DS9 waa a really good series for being a rip off. Maybe the last good trek series period.

[@AmIsraelChai4Trump]

Speak faster please. Even 5sec of watching this video feels like waiting behind a great grandmother paying for $50 of groceries with pennies.