The Dominion Wars Mod is the oldest of all of the remaining Starfleet Command III Mods. First released in February 2003, the mod was, well, pretty poor in it's first incarnation. However, the seeds were sown for future releases. I got a lot of feedback on what players liked about the mod. Faster Gameplay (though in v1, it was way too fast), lots of weapons on the ships, ships that could withstand more than one alpha strike. And of course, lots of new ships. The feature that garnered the most attention though was the 9 race map concept, even though 5 of the races were non-playable. I set about making version 2 of the mod. I added yet more ships, slowed things down to a more reasonable pace, but still a lot faster than the original game. Refined the balance and fixed many of the problems that had arisen from the original version. v2 was a huge success, and it was then that the first online campaign took place. It was little more than a free for all map, but still, it got quite a bit of attention. Proper rules were formed, and the Operational Area Rule was brought in. After this, the campaigns became very popular, and so did the mod itself. Part of the reason why the campaigns became so popular was of course, the mission scripts. At the time, nobody except me was writing new missions for SFC3. Suffice to say that they became very popular, and you will be hard pressed to find a mod today that does not contain some of my scripts. Version 3 was built, and it was then that things really began to take off with the Dominion Wars Mod. It was this version that the Expanded Refit System was first introduced. Until now, DomWars was like most mods, it used the separate refit items identified for each of the 4 playable races. This version didn't do that, it put them together and gave each race a huge number of items to work with. It used refit mass to balance, rather than making the items different. The more mass you had in a certain area, the stronger you would be in that area. Of course, weapons still heavily distinguished each race. Version 3 went through many incarnations, and had many, many popular campaigns. However, the number of downloads had grown rather high, so everything was compiled together & finally put into 1 single download. Of course, it wouldn't be a new release of DomWars if something new wasn't added. There were new ships, improved balance, less bugs, new scripts, and so on. Version 4 became the most successful release of Dominion Wars ever. Recording nearly 15,000 downloads on sfc3files.com. Version 4 has been through numerous incarnations, many of which could easily have been deemed to be "version 5" - however, by then, Version 5 had been announced to be the final release of the DomWars Mod. That is the main reason why v4 has had more versions than all previous releases of DomWars put together!! After v4.3 - which is the 2nd most downloaded version of DomWars on sfc3files, many of the versions were experiments, designed to test new ideas, and possible new features. All geared towards the preparation of version 5. The next release of DomWars will be version 4.7 - which will in fact be very similar to what version 5 was originally going to be. It's expected to be released sometime in July, with probably beta testing in late June. If you wish to know more about version 5 - Project Timelines, then visit the forums, information will be posted there on that project.