Greetings Leaders,
With 2025 underway, we wanted to give some insight into DomiNations' future. This Summer, we’re arriving at a substantial milestone: 10 Years of DomiNations! A Big year calls for a Huge celebration, and our 10th Anniversary celebration is shaping up to be just that. We’ll look back at the history of the game, and celebrate some of the most exciting moments throughout the years. However, before we can reflect on the past, we’d like to address the future!
With this Road Ahead, we’ll talk about what we’re bringing to DomiNations in 2025! We’ll introduce the new way you’ll go on the offensive in battle with Detachments. We’re also taking on a massive initiative to re-evaluate your Troops' strengths and weaknesses in combat. Earlier this year, we implemented some light Replay fixes, and are still working to implement more of this work. We’re also making room to finally tackle a fix for the University & Alliance SpeedUps. We’ll be giving more attention and an updated look to our website, DomiNations World, which will feature some of the best crown deals that you can find! Then finally, we’ll give you a peek at a new feature coming to the Robotics Age!
What have we been up to?
The team has been hard at work, not only preparing for future content but also examining the health of the game and tackling long-requested quality-of-life features. This is a multi-faceted approach and while each project is coming along, some are taking longer than we would like.
We do hear you when you ask for fixes around Replays, SpeedUp assists, Museum Loadouts, and more. These are high-priority items, and some systems that we’re currently working on will impact the improvement work happening alongside those asks.
As an example and a bit of transparency, while one group was working on Tournament of Glory, another was (and still is) tackling the replay system. Much like in DomiNations, we can only put so many of our team members on a given task at a time, and we can’t have all hands on tackling the replay issue. As we’ll be highlighting here, there are many projects we’re hoping to implement within 2025 that include tackling some of these long-standing bugs.
Detachments
Gain more control over your Troops with the upcoming Detachments feature. You’ll be able to fill each Detachment with a set of Troops and Generals of your choosing. Each group you create will have a Rally with its own cooldown timer to tackle multiple fronts in your battles. We’ll give a full reveal on how Detachments will improve your strategies in each battle prior to the feature’s arrival in 12.16. You won’t need to wait long, as these notes will go live in mid-March!
Combat Rebalance Initiative
In 2025 we’re taking a holistic approach to improving the overall game balance of combat within DomiNations. The game has been out for 10 years, and a lot has changed since the initial release. Alongside some changes to how you play the game, as mentioned in Detachments and our previously launched Tournament of Glory, we’re taking a careful look at the strategic role of each unit and defensive building in every Age in both multiplayer and World War battles.
Our goals are to:
- Make combat more fun for both attackers and defenders for the next 10 years of DomiNations
- Increase the variety of viable builds for both attackers and defenders
- Narrow the gap between optimal builds and viable builds
- Increase the viability of some of DomiNations’ least effective units
- Preserve the overall viability of most players current builds in the game
For more context, here are the four levels of build viability as we define them in Game Balance terminology:
Levels of Build Viability:
- Optimal (or “min-maxed”): these builds contain the best performance that one can mathematically squeeze out of the game’s systems. A player who has created an optimal build has probably spent a fair amount of time reverse-engineering the game’s systems, comparing numbers, finding ways to stack bonuses or identify broken skill combos…or they’ve found an online guide from someone else who has.
- Viable: these builds may not be mathematically perfect, but they provide a playable experience throughout the game. A typical player should be able to progress through the game without major problems, if they’re playing a viable build.
- Marginally Viable: these builds are suboptimal, but can still potentially be used to progress in the hands of a skilled player. Such a build would be nonviable for most players, but expert players may create such a build on purpose as a personal challenge.
- Nonviable: a nonviable build is completely hopeless and could not be salvaged, even in the hands of an expert.
Rebalancing combat for a 10-year-old game is a complex task that we believe is essential for the longevity of DomiNations and it must be done in partnership with you, the community! These updates will take some time and won’t all be released at once, as we will need to reevaluate the state of the game with each iteration of unit changes we introduce. In fact, this collaboration has already started with the release of Tournament of Glory and will continue with Detachments. We look forward to seeing how you all respond to these major features, watching how they change the balance of DomiNations, and incorporating that data into our evolving plans for the Combat Rebalance Initiative.
University/Alliance SpeedUps & Replays
Our first round of replay fixes went live in 12.14, an incremental fix to prepare for additional updates to the replay system. These replay fixes will help them and the battle report to become more reliable in the future and also become a big part of how we can track instances of game manipulation/cheating more accurately. Initially, our next update to our replay fixes was planned for update 12.15, but it wasn’t quite ready for release. We have since made plans for this next stage of fixes to be released in a near future update, however, it will not be in our 12.16 update.
Plans to implement a fix for the long-ailing disappearances of Alliance & University Speed Ups are underway. This iterates upon some of our previous work and is targeted for an update in early Summer.
Less Tapping, Play Faster!
We’re planning to take the work from the ‘Claim All’ rewards button within the Quests window and implement it within Event Rewards. An easy ‘Claim All’ button to advance on your Event Passes without scrolling is planned to arrive mid-Spring.
We’ll also examine additional ways to reduce tapping in non-battle-related areas of DomiNations. One such example is that you’ll have a way to quickly use SpeedUps efficiently, and not have to select them one by one.
Delete & Rename Bases
Playing DomiNations with multiple different Bases had become a staple for many of our highly dedicated Leaders. We sought to make that experience easier with the transition to our new Login system. But we’re not stopping there. Many have asked to be able to edit their Bases or remove Bases they just don’t want to use anymore. So, we’re planning to add the ability to delete and rename your Bases. You can expect more news on this update when it arrives for its planned mid-spring release!
Dominations World Webstore (Visual Update)
DomiNations World is a fantastic way to play DomiNations with a steadily improving infrastructure, so much so that we’ll be giving the Webstore an updated look! The DomiNations World Webstore will feature some of the best deals on Crown packages compared to the mobile version of DomiNations. Make sure to check the Webstore often for some of the best exclusive deals and offers DomiNations has ever seen! Crowns, Legendary Tokens, Troop Tactics, and more are all up for grabs, so go check them out today! This update is slated for release in mid-March.
10th Anniversary
As we said at the beginning of our Road Ahead, we’re celebrating our 10th Anniversary this year! We have tons of events planned for you to participate in, including celebrating those who have been with us throughout the life of the game. Our celebration will begin on 4/1 with giveaways, both in-game and physical items (Physical items limited to US only), discounts, and a fun trip down memory lane. We’ll cover everything you need to know and how to participate through our blog post going live on 3/21!
Combating Cheating & Game Manipulation
We continue to battle against exploits against DomiNations and players that create an unfair play environment. Some of the features mentioned above, such as Tournament of Glory, have tools that help make it easier to detect and combat cheating. This will always be an ongoing battle, but with the additional framework already in the works, we’ll be far more effective at stopping present and future cheating Players. We have new internal features that will provide more insight and add additional prevention measures targeting a 2nd Quarter release schedule in the Summer.
Robotics Age
The highly Anticipated Robotics Age is currently targeted to wrap up 2025! Historically, a new Age comes with new upgrades. Along with the new tier of Upgrades, this time, we’ll be adding an element that can bring your unique style to the battlefield. We’ll be authorizing the deployment of Commanders with the Robotics Age!
We’re still very early in development on Commanders, a Troop that you’ll be able to develop and customize to your liking. This troop will even give bonuses to your Detachments to make them all the more potent. What’s even more exciting is this will be a fully featured unit that has a customizable look based on the equipment you apply to it!
That’s all for now! DomiNations has been running 10 years strong, and 2025 is laying the foundation for what we hope is another 10 years! We’re hoping to not only refresh the way you play the game but revisit the many systems within and bring them to a modern era. The core of DomiNations is to build, battle, and dominate! We’ll continue to focus on that guiding star throughout the year and get you back into the battle with a wide array of possibilities.
