OpenFront Attack Ratio — What Percent to Use

For wilderness, 6,600 troops on plains is the ceiling — past that your advance does not get one tile faster. For player attacks, your losses bottom out at 1.67× the defender’s troops, and everything above that is thrown away.

Pushing the slider to 100% is the most common mistake in this game. Here is what the code actually does.

What the slider controls

The slider sets the fraction of your troops sent on the next attack. Those troops leave your pool the moment you click.

They cost you twice:

1. They die in combat
2. While they are out, they are not generating growth

The second one is bigger. Troop growth scales with your current troop count, so emptying your pool slows the refill itself. See Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule.

Wilderness — 6,600 and no further

Unclaimed land is simple. Each tile costs a “budget”:

budget per tile = clamp(2000 × terrain speed ÷ attacking troops, 5, 100)

Lower is faster. But the floor is 5, so past a certain troop count nothing improves.

You start with 25,000 troops, so a 26% slider already saturates plains expansion.

So what do you do with the rest

Expand in several directions at once. Advance rate scales with border length, so three fronts beat one.

Early game, hold the slider at 10–30% and click in multiple directions. The opening simulator lets you compare rhythms directly.

Bots lose only half as much taking wilderness (÷10 instead of ÷5). That is why they appear to spread so fast early.

Player attacks — two different thresholds

Here is where the common advice goes wrong. The community calls it the “2:1 rule,” but the code contains two separate clamps with different break-even points.

Read it like this:

• Sending 1.22× the defender’s troops maxes out your advance speed
• Bottoming out the loss multiplier takes 1.67×
• Past 1.67×, neither number improves

There is a ceiling on the other side too: even against a vastly larger player, your loss multiplier stops at 2.0. So sending a timid trickle is the worst option — you eat the same 2.0 multiplier and take no ground.

There is a limit to what troops can buy

Attacker losses are the sum of two terms:

attacker loss = (troop-ratio term) + (defender density term)

The ratio clamp above multiplies both terms, so more troops lower your whole loss — until the floor of 0.6.

But because it hits both equally, the balance between them ignores your troop count. The density term’s share is set by the defender’s troops ÷ tiles owned alone — their defensive density.

Practical consequences:

• Piling on troops bottoms out at a factor of 0.6. Driving losses toward zero is structurally impossible
• Instead, pick targets whose troops are spread thin, and that term shrinks with them
• A player with lots of land and few troops is your best target. Long borders make density worse
• How to spot one: high land share on the leaderboard, low troops on the hover overlay. The game never displays tile counts, so that pairing is the only way to read density

Situation guide

Sent the wrong amount? Pay 25% and pull out

The red ❌ in the event panel cancels an attack in progress. It costs 25% of the attacking force; the other 75% comes home.

Paying 25% to stop feeding a losing fight is usually correct. Returning troops go straight back to work as growth.

Nukes cannot be recalled once launched.

More

• Opening simulator — compare slider values over 60 seconds
• Troop cap calculator — your cap and growth peak
• Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule — why hoarding costs you