OpenFront in Five Minutes
What OpenFront is, how you win, and what every part of the screen means. The first thing to read if you have just started playing.
The short version
- Win condition: 80% of the land in FFA, 95% team total in Teams
- Press
Spacefor terrain and expand toward plains — 16 troops per tile versus 24 on mountain - Attacking a Tribe cuts your losses by 30%. That alone usually picks your direction
OpenFront is a browser-based real-time territory game. Dozens of human players and hundreds of bots expand across the same map simultaneously.
The one thing that determines everything
You win by holding 80% of the non-irradiated land (95% in team modes).
That means the goal is expansion, not survival. A turtling playstyle cannot win — not because it is weak, but because the win condition literally does not allow it. Every decision in this game follows from that sentence.
The loop
- Take land → your troop cap rises
- Troops grow → you have attacking power
- Gold accumulates → you build cities and ports
- Buildings raise the cap and income → back to step 1
How fast you cycle this is what skill looks like in OpenFront.
Reading the screen
The control panel — the part that matters
| Element | Meaning |
|---|---|
+troops/s | Growth rate. Green = rate rising, orange = rate falling |
| Troop bar | current / max troops |
| Gold | Balance and incoming gold |
| Attack ratio slider | Share of troops committed per attack (1–100%, default 20%) |
When it turns orange, attack. You have passed the growth peak. The reasoning is in Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule.
Everything else
- Leaderboard, top left — name, land %, gold, troops
- Options, top right — timer, settings, pause (single-player only), exit
- Events panel, right — alliance requests, attack alerts, quick chat. The red ❌ retreats an attack at a cost of 25% of the committed troops
- Hover a nation — player type, attitude, troops, gold, building count
- Right-click — radial menu (⚔ attack / ⛵ boat / 🔧 build / ℹ info)
On the map
A checkered border marks territory covered by a defense post. Attacking into it multiplies your losses by five. Learn to see it.
Press Space to strip nation colors and reveal terrain. Use it to pick your expansion direction.
Three kinds of opponent
| Type | What it is | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Human | A real player | Starts with 25,000 troops |
| Nation | Named AI country | Builds structures, has diplomacy and an attitude toward you |
| Tribe | Unnamed bot | 10,000 troops, cannot build. Humans take 30% fewer losses attacking them |
400 tribes are scattered across a default public map. Early on, eating tribes is mathematically far better than fighting players.
What to do in your first three games
- Load a single-player game and try
Space(terrain view) andP(pause) - Drop the attack slider to 10% and click wilderness in every direction
- Click when the growth rate goes orange; wait while it is green
- At 125,000 gold, build a city well inside your territory
Those four habits already put you ahead of most new players.