Star Trek: Armada III begins with the first stirrings of the Dominion War and allows players to take command of five unique factions, the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Cardassian Union/Dominion Alliance, and the Borg Collective. Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.
"Their shields are down to sixty five percent. Three Cardassian cruisers are in spacedock, orbiting the far side of the planet. Two of them are getting underway. The Malpara and the Ning'tao have completed their attack."
....
"The Malpara is gone. No survivors. Ning'tao is heading out of the system. The Cardassians are pursuing."
"And they're leaving their base unprotected. Helm, take us in. Bring us to a hover three hundred meters above the base. Stand by to decloak on my command."
"Holding at three hundred meters."
"Scan the base."
"They've dispatched damage control teams. Two defence batteries are out... and they've just dropped their primary shield grid."
"Decloak the ship, and open fire!"
Love this episode. Bringing back Kor from TOS was a brilliant idea.
It was hard not to love John Colicos.
In your shot, there are shields. The only fault of DS9's later CGI Special Effects was the total lack of shields.
Yeah I agree, DS9 flopped on that one. It's also becoming a trend with the new gen of movies and tv series, no cgi for shields. But your screenshot is perfect. Love it.
Let's be honest, though - considering the quality of the Dominion War story arc, the fantastic episodes that came out of it and the great space battle scenes we got, I think the absence of shield flare is a minor issue at most.
Of course.
doing shield flares on all those ships would probably have been a nightmare...
I'd rather take fewer ships on screen with shields than what we did get. I honestly wasnt a big fan of how they handled the Dominion War. Ooh, aah, lots of ships, lots of explosions!
I still love the Mutara battle or Khitomer far more.
Smaller scale, more intimate. Casualties actually have more impact than seeing random Miranda #874 get blasted to the scrap pile it should have been in years before.
Thats not to say im against fleet battles, just not the absurd number of ships we saw. Rather than a hundred ships for example, saw a dozen where we see names and faces of Captains. Help the audience actually see who might not make it home...you know like how B5 handled their wars.
I think for many people it was the reused shots of fleet battles, from sacrifice of Angels, that made it feel a bit meh, how many times did they reuse the shot of the Klingons going in? I get that it was down to cost, Series 7 i think was the worst for reusing shots.
Don't get me wrong i think DS9 is the best ST out there, i just think in hindsight maybe could of done something new for the series 7 finale in terms of battle, as 90% of the battle was rehashed battle shots, think there was even footage of destroyed birds of prey interiors from ST6 and Generations in there as well.
As for Shields i am sure some of the VFX guys have said it was down to timings, getting shield effects on those ships in the large scale battles would have taken an very long time to do and they didnt have that time scale.
They explained this in the official star trek magazine back in the 1990's, nobody wants to see "shields holding" as they did in multiple episodes of TNG, it'd make for very boring fleet battles.