(This article is focused on issues that are of most interest to other laser tag operators, but anyone is welcome to read it.)
Domination is absolutely one of the best games in our sport. It allows both advanced and new players to excel almost equally, requires some low-level team coordination and reaction to opposing strategies, and provides unlimited respawns without penalty. Here are some observations and suggestions on how to run domination more smoothly.
Observations
- Many domination control point devices are available, but they generally fall into three categories: electronic shoot-to-control, electonic button-press-to-control, and physical options. There are pros and cons of all of them. We use the physical domination arms we designed for several reasons. First, they’re cheap. Building them is going to cost about $20 per arm. Second, they’re cheap. (As I’ll elaborate on in a moment, you really NEED several of these things.) And third, although the time-to-control isn’t adjustible, it’s still comparable to, say, the Battlelux boxes’ default and has the advantage that no one is encouraged to dive in head first towards the box to take control of it. (Deceleration and pivoting take more time for the player on a physical box than electronic boxes that allow those actions to take place while the box is being taken control of.)
- Once you start to run domination on your field, don’t be surprised if it ends up being 90% or more of the total games you play. Every game ends up feeling different and varied because of the differing team strategies. On asymmetric fields a side swap also creates entirely new challenges.
- Because you don’t need to count deaths at all for Domination players have all the flexibility they could ever hope for to try and develop new strategies and tactics. In a deathmatch any failure is a penalty against the team, but in Domination it’s only a penalty in the sense that players must personally respawn before trying again.
- The lack of penalties for dying are what make domination more balanced than most games when it comes to advanced vs. new players. Death might be tiring, but it doesn’t cost the team anything. Similarly, constantly mowing down the opposition is only useful if it keeps them away from the control points. Careful placement of those points will mean that defenders will usually take at least some damage even if attackers come in spraying. The trick is to balance the placement so that neither careful defensive play nor simply charging in with the first shot can completely overwhelm the other. Beware both blind corners and choke points for this reason.
- Don’t be fooled: while the different types of control points do have similar game play, they aren’t exactly the same. Electronic devices usually count down (or up to a specific point) and then sit in a fixed state for the rest of the game. This essentially shrinks your active field area as the game goes on. Physical devices can’t register how long a team held the point, only who has it at the moment you look. Shooting to control a domination box can sometimes be done from a short distance. Pressing a button or manipulating a physical device requires being able to touch it. Lenghthening the mandatory button-held-down time (or number of shots to take control) can make control changes hazardous, particularly if the defending team has dug in heavily. Consider these issues when you decide which ones you want on your field and where you place them.
Administrative Suggestions on How to Run Domination
- Don’t run this game with less than three points if you can help it and definitely never run it with one. (Did I mention how the domination arms are CHEAP?) Here’s why: domination points basically reduce your entire field to areas within about a 50′ radius of each point. This is great for action-packed play because it’s easy to find and engage the enemy. If, however, you only have one point out there then you’ve just shrunk your entire field to a postage stamp. The challenge comes in having to balance two or (preferably) three of these points. Domination is about balancing your personnel for area control, not mowing down the opposition long enough that someone can survive all the way up to kick an arm over.
- Whether you’re swapping sides between games or not, kick one or more of the domination points a foot or so towards the side of the field that lost. This will slowly adjust their placement to more or less completely equal based on the teams you have and the skills of individual players to optimize based on the terrain and obstacles.
- If you’re playing Domination to see who controls the points at the end then by all means a short game is better. (It also gives people a chance to reset their strategies more often!) If you’ve got an electronic box that declares victory after a certain amount of time, however, expect to play longer games. On control-X-seconds-to-win boxes the trick is that the total time to win must be long enough that teams can swap control multiple times. This is going to require a fairly long time to win setting. Personally, I think that the short game allows people to wallow less when they think they’re losing overall. Whether they’re right or not the game finishes quickly and they can try again from scratch. Nothing is worse than getting stuck in a control-for-time-to-win game where you KNOW that your team is hosed and having to fight it out just to wait out the other team’s timer.