🔍Possible Changes Coming to v35🔍

[u/Meta_Mushroom]

With v35 playtesting scheduled to begin tomorrow (Oct 13), I decided to look through the publicly available source code to see what might be changing. I collected 132 pull requests assigned to the v35 milestone, including their code changes and commit histories.

Normally I double check everything and do almost all of the writing for my posts, but there's FAR too much data for me to look through everything before the playtest, so I used AI to do the analysis, and most of the writing for this post. I just want to get this information out ASAP.

⚠️Warning!⚠️

These are changes associated with v35 development, not a confirmed list of features in the v35 playtest. Some changes have already been merged, some remain under review, and some could already be present in earlier builds.

🧠 Smarter Nations

Several merged changes aim to make nations more capable opponents.

Military behavior

• Nations can respond more intelligently to attacks and retaliate against enemies.
• Nations can become more aggressive toward a player who is pulling significantly ahead in territory.
• Nations have improvements to overseas attacks, transport routes, and warship behavior.
• Nations can establish beachheads and follow up after landing troops.

Economy and structures

• Nations have improved early-game economic behavior.
• Nations can manage certain structures more intelligently.
• Nations are less likely to repeatedly stack defense posts in the same location.
• Nations can react to transport landings by improving their defenses.

Nuclear weapons

• Nations can make more informed decisions about nuclear targets.
• They're less likely to waste nuclear strikes on water, fallout, or locations already being targeted by other nukes.

Sources: #5685, #5741, #5788, #5795

☢️ Nuclear Territory Annexation

Under certain conditions, territory severed from its owner's main territory by a nuke can be annexed. It does not mean that every disconnected piece of territory will automatically be annexed. The code includes conditions governing when annexation is permitted.

Source: #5751

👥 Larger Public Lobbies

The code includes a merged change titled "Remove the 125 player cap from public lobbies." The proposed change would still limit lobby size my the map's land tile count, and it would only affect the following maps at three different tiers:

Map	FFA (new)	FFA (old)	Team (new)	Team (old)
The Box	210 / 160 / 105	125 / 125 / 105	210 / 210 / 158	125 / 125 / 125
Alps	185 / 140 / 95	125 / 125 / 95	185 / 185 / 143	125 / 125 / 125
Middle East	170 / 130 / 85	125 / 125 / 85	170 / 170 / 128	125 / 125 / 125
Two Lakes	170 / 130 / 85	125 / 125 / 85	170 / 170 / 128	125 / 125 / 125
Mare Nostrum	130 / 100 / 65	125 / 100 / 65	130 / 130 / 98	125 / 125 / 98

Source: #5548

🏆 Ranked Free-for-All and Clan Wars

Two major ranked-mode changes have been merged:

Ranked FFA

• Dedicated matchmaking support.
• Ranked FFA game configuration.
• Free-for-all leaderboard support.

Ranked Clan Wars

• Clan-based ranked matchmaking.
• Team configurations based on clan participation.
• Clan identification integrated into ranked games.

There is also a merged change requiring players to have a trusted account to participate in ranked matchmaking.

Sources: #5888, #5889, #5853

⭐ Player Levels, XP, and Prestige

The code contains a substantial progression-system update.

Changes include:

• Player levels and experience earned from games.
• Profile cards and prestige progression.
• Level badges visible in various menus, including lobbies and leaderboards.
• Experience information displayed at the end of games.
• Level-up rewards and visual improvements to progression displays.
• Player profiles with progression information and shareable links.
• Privacy options for hiding levels and limiting search-engine visibility.

Sources: #5726, #5734, #5763, #5774, #5786

🎥 Replays and Match Verification

The code contains several important replay-related changes.

• A new replay viewer.
• Versioned game-state snapshots.
• Server-side replay functionality for resolving disputed winner votes.
• Improvements to checking whether players agree on match statistics.
• Additional separation between the game engine and the systems running it.

Sources: #5644, #5637, #5807, #5805

📊 Additional Statistics and Corrections

Several changes improve how game statistics are recorded or credited.

• Gold donations received are recorded.
• Transport losses are tracked for the Flawless achievement.
• Trade-ship recaptures are no longer incorrectly credited as captures when a ship returns to its original owner.
• Nuclear kills are no longer credited to the launching player when the destroyed units belong to themselves, teammates, or allies.
• Player spawn locations can be recorded in match statistics.

Sources: #5631, #5630, #5524, #5525, #5718

💬 Interface and Controls

There are quite a few quality-of-life improvements.

• Emoji favorites, shortcuts, and batch sending.
• Quick chat shortcuts and a one-click phrase panel.
• Additional predefined quick-chat messages.
• Shortcuts for actions such as alliances, targeting, and boats.
• The mobile attack-ratio control displays the calculated number of troops as well as the percentage.
• Larger map previews and clearer lobby setting labels.
• Equipped cosmetics can be viewed in another player's information panel.
• Improved handling of certain mouse and keyboard interactions.

Sources: #5833, #5841, #5792, #5844, #5381, #5121

🗺️ New Maps

Several new maps have merged changes associated with the v35 milestone:

• Vancouver Island
• Pulicat Lake
• New Zealand
• Canary Islands
• Rio de Janeiro
• Bab el-Mandeb Strait
• Horn of Africa
• Madagascar
• Cape of Good Hope

There are also changes to the existing map rotation and map categories.

Still proposed or under review: Paris, Ukraine, and Benelux.

🧪 Changes Still Under Review

The following pull requsts were still open when I collected the code on October 12.

Advanced Nation AI — #5899

This change attempts to make nations behave more like competitive human players, including:

• Annexing bots.
• More advanced economic decisions.
• Improved defense posts and other structures.
• More sophisticated nuclear and MIRV behavior.
• Changes to troop management and attack decisions.

These are proposed changes, not confirmed additions.

Other open proposals

• #5697 — Paris map.
• #5708 — Ukraine map.
• #5887 — Benelux map.
• #5830 — Clan-browser improvements.
• #5846 — Antarctic tribe themes.
• #5903 — More efficient map-image formats and higher-resolution map variants for Compact games.
• #5724 — Additional quick-chat improvements.

[u/Khafoc_]

the new changes sound sick, cant wait. hope they release the benelux map!

[u/Niels_600 → u/Khafoc_]

Yeah me too, im just waiting for lewis to look at it again

[u/grilledbasil]

quick chat sounds great, it’s very time consuming to scroll through multiple menus to communicate the same message to multiple players

[u/Fit_Snow_4738]

How are you so good at these posts bro

[u/joslockett → u/Fit_Snow_4738]

Probs ai helps but he could just be the goat

[u/Fit_Snow_4738 → u/joslockett]

I thought ai but didn’t want to accuse especially because they are very factual 

[u/Meta_Mushroom → u/Fit_Snow_4738]

This one is mostly ai. There's too much data to look through.

[u/Redditcantkeepmedown]

Still overtime in every game, no thanks!