OpenFront Doomsday Clock — 150 Seconds From Skull to Gone

The DOOMSDAY CLOCK breaks stalemates by steadily raising the share of the map every side must hold. The bar stays at 0% for the first ten minutes, then climbs through seven waves to a final 35%.

Drop below it and a skull appears: troops start draining 30 seconds later, and 150 seconds after the skull your territory is gone entirely. Troops themselves never hit zero — they stop at 5% of your cap. What kills you is territory rot, not the drain.

It is a lobby option and off by default. The dropdown beside it is the speed (Slow / Normal / Fast / Very Fast).

Public lobbies can run it too. The lobby card carries a DOOMSDAY CLOCK label with the speed, and the pre-join detail list repeats it — so you can always tell before you commit.

How the bar rises

The bar is a share of the map’s land tiles. It never jumps: each wave climbs smoothly to its level, holds briefly, then the next wave starts. The four speeds differ only in pace — the rungs differ only between FFA and team modes.

FFA rungs    2 / 4 / 7 / 11 / 17 / 25 / 35 %
Team rungs   3 / 6 / 10 / 15 / 21 / 28 / 35 %

Team modes climb a higher ladder to the same ceiling. The final rung is 35% either way and it arrives at the same moment; only the middle rungs sit higher for teams.

The timings below are shared by both ladders.

Each time is when that wave is reached. In between the bar is still climbing, so in FFA at Normal 14:00 the live requirement sits somewhere between 2% and 4%.

The ten-minute grace matters most. Even on Very Fast the clock touches nobody before 10:00, so everything that happens in the opening is ordinary combat.

What happens when you are caught

The countdown starts the moment the skull appears.

0s      skull blinks. No damage yet — this is the warning window
30s     troop drain begins. Skull goes steady
120s    troops reach the floor (5% of cap), territory rot begins. Skull turns red
150s    territory is zero. Eliminated

The three windows do different jobs.

• 0–30s is a pure grace period. Climb back above the bar here and nothing happened at all
• 30–120s drains troops — but never to zero. The floor starts at 40% of your cap and decays to 5% over 90 seconds, so recovering early leaves you a usable army
• 120–150s is the actual execution. Rot works to a deadline: it takes tiles remaining divided by seconds remaining, so a large empire and a small one both reach zero at 150s

Rot opens with scattered pinholes across roughly 15% of the territory for the first ten seconds, then the holes grow together. If the map suddenly looks speckled, you are already past 120s.

Rotted ground becomes fallout, not free land. Neighbours cannot simply absorb it — retaking it costs the fallout multiplier (×5 on losses and advance speed). This keeps rot from handing the leader free territory: the one side the clock never presses should not collect the ground of everyone it kills.

Climbing back above the bar clears everything instantly — the skull, the drain, and the rot progress, which restarts from scratch. Recovering at 130s carries no penalty.

Why recovery feels impossible

Because the drain is measured against your troop cap, not your current troops.

drain per second = troop cap × 2%      (when the drain starts)
                 → linearly over 90s
                 = troop cap × 5%      (maximum)

Growth slows as you approach the cap (see why your troops stopped growing) while the drain stays proportional to it. That is why even the opening 2%/s already outpaces income. Hoarding troops is not a way out. There is exactly one way out: more tiles.

That also fixes what to do with the 30-second warning. Grab whatever land is cheap — bots, empty ground, a weak border — rather than massing troops.

Who never gets marked

The leader is immune. Whichever side holds the most tiles is never marked, even below the bar. The clock exists to cull challengers toward the leader, so it can never freeze the game with every remaining side pinned at the floor.

Bots (shown in game as Tribe) are not counted. Only humans and Nations are. So bot territory is never cleaned up for you — it stays there as land you can take, which makes it the first thing to grab during a warning.

Team modes judge the team’s combined territory, on their own ladder. The bar does not scale with headcount — a duo and a quad face the same requirement — but teams use the Team column above (3/6/10…). When a team falls short every member gets the skull at once. See team strategy for how to split territory and troops.

Fallout lowers the bar

The denominator is land tiles minus fallout tiles. The more nukes land, the less land there is — and the fewer tiles the bar demands.

In a late game full of nukes, do not read your own percentage in isolation. Your holdings can stay flat while the bar sinks under you into safety, or an enemy can drop fallout on your ground and push you below it. The nuke calculator will tell you how many tiles a strike removes.

Warships collapse much faster than troops

Warships bleed under the same skull, but on a different curve.

A ship caught early lasts about as long as your troops do; once the ramp is near maximum it drops to the floor in roughly two seconds. The floor is the same 5% of max health, and ships are never sunk (no kill is credited to anyone). While marked, warship self-repair is suppressed.

If you are running a fleet, the naval clock is far more urgent than the troop one. Numbers are in the warship guide.

Playing around it

Once you are in a game with it on, start watching the leaderboard’s territory % from 10:00. Note that territory % is reported in 0.1% steps, so it reads 0.0% for a long time early (see measuring distance on screen). It becomes useful around the 2% wave.

Near the bar, judge everything by land. Stockpiling troops, adding buildings, and managing alliances all drop in priority here — the requirement keeps rising, so “exactly enough” becomes “short” within seconds.

A marked enemy is the cheapest target on the map. Their troops bleed on their own from 30s and their land collapses from 120s. You rarely need an expensive assault; pushing the border once rot starts is enough. Check the trade with the combat loss calculator.

If you are hosting, the speed sets the match length. Very Fast runs its first wave at 10:36 and its last at 15:00, making it effectively a 15-minute game. Slow stretches to 45:00.

Summary

Do not confuse it with OVERTIME

There are two stalemate-breaking lobby options, and they push in opposite directions.

Overtime turns itself on in public games. Roughly one in four public FFA matches runs with it, and those lobbies carry an Overtime label on the card. Public team games never get it. DOOMSDAY CLOCK, by contrast, only runs if a host switches it on.

With both on, the game closes from both sides. OVERTIME starts from 80% in both modes, so from the 30-minute mark it would reach 0% at 70 min — somebody wins well before that. Win conditions themselves are in game modes and options.

Every number here is extracted from the game source. When one changes it shows up in the patch value history.