I give Trek battles a pass in this respect for the simple reasons of dramatic license. In single ship battles, you need to convey "rising tension". So you have ship hit, shields weaken, ship fires, other ship evades, ship hit again, shields weakening, ship makes desperate evasive turn...... For fleet battles trying to do that would radically slow down the pacing of the story so it is not viable to include.
But then wouldn't that mean that the Federation was destroying less ships, than the Domonion? I don't know if the effect was on purpose, or there wasn't enough screen time or budget money, but it was never shown. In all the major Domonion battles you don't see it. The Fleet battle in SOA was one the best space battles I've ever seen. They showed almost everything-the Fed fighters, fleet formations, tactics. Even the Klingons showing up at the nick of time. Perfect blend of story telling and special effects.
Only that they can withstand it significantly better than before. Which may still only tell of a partial reversal of technological imbalance. It's not as if "Jem'Hadar" unambiguously established that the shields would have been having no effect at all against the enemy weapons, either; we're probably talking about grades and shades here. (One wonders if the weapon effectiveness in "Jem'Hadar" really was due to a strong imbalance. Perhaps it was just a psychological trick, accomplished by having a saboteur aboard the Odyssey who informed the attackers of shield frequencies or weakened the shields?) Timo Saloniemi
Oh yeah I always hated this on DS9, where an unimportant ship to story gets blown up in matter of seconds. But a runabout full of important characters sustains many shots by an array of enemies and does not get a scratch.
I'd saythat in DS9, having a certain main character aboard is a valid reason for a runabout surviving, say, like in "The Die is Cast". That is, whenever Odo is aboard, the enemy is very unlikely to shoot to kill. In the early Dominion episodes, our heroes don't realize this yet, of course. But later on, hailing the enemy and saying "BTW, meet our Constable" is better than raising shields... Timo Saloniemi
I was never a big fan of the shield bubble effect so I liked te channge. It can be pu down to hull hugging shields. To be fair i tink in the fleet battles we can just assume te ships have aleady sustained multiple hits before the explosioon shot. It's more annoying when we see fragile ships in one on one combat.