Reading the OpenFront Bottom Bar

The bottom bar is three rows: resources, the attack ratio slider, and the build bar. Of everything on it, one thing drives your decisions — the troops / cap ratio.

It looks like a lot of numbers at first. Once you know what each one is, you can pick your next move without ever leaving the screen.

Row 1 — resources

Three clusters, left to right.

What the colour tells you

The gain figure is green while your growth rate is climbing and orange while it is falling.

The moment it turns orange, you just passed the growth peak. No arithmetic needed — orange means spend.

The peak sits at 42.2% of your cap. Why that exact number, derivative included, is in Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule.

The ratio is the instruction

2.40M / 2.66M is 90% of cap. Run the real growth formula at that point and you get this:

Sitting at 90% earns you 30% of what you could be earning. That single table is why hoarding troops is the worst habit in this game.

The other direction is forgiving: 50% still pays 98% of peak. Letting your troops drift between 35% and 55% is the rule that is actually easy to hold in a live match.

Put your own numbers in with the Troop Cap Calculator.

Row 2 — the attack ratio slider

It reads like 20% (480K) — the percentage and the actual troop count together. One click will send 480,000 troops.

• T lowers it, Y raises it. Far faster than dragging
• The same value governs troop donations. Raise it before sending troops to an ally

Get into the habit of reading the number in parentheses, because it is directly comparable to the defender’s troops.

• Against wilderness, anything past 6,600 on plains is wasted
• Against a player, losses bottom out at 1.67× the defender’s troops

The reasoning is in What Attack Ratio Should You Use?.

Row 3 — the build bar

Ten slots, 1 through 0. The small digit in the corner is the hotkey.

The number beside the icon is not a price

It is how many you already own — well, strictly the sum of their levels. 1 🏙 86 means 86 levels of city.

Reading it as a price throws off every decision you make. The actual price climbs with how many you have built: cities, ports and factories follow min(1,000,000, 2ⁿ × 125,000) gold, so from the fourth onward it is flat at one million.

Ports and factories share one counter. With 42 ports, your next factory is already at the cap. The Building Cost Calculator accounts for the shared counter.

Greyed-out slots

A slot you cannot afford will not respond. The nuke slots (8, 9, 0) stay dead until you own a Missile Silo, because that is what launches them.

A reading order that works

Fix the order you scan in and you stop deliberating every cycle.

1. Colour of the gain figure — orange means spend now
2. Troops / cap — inside 35–55% is healthy. Above it, attack. Below it, skip a cycle
3. Gold — past 125,000 gold, build a city. Early and mid game there is rarely a better use
4. The absolute number on the slider — compare it to the defender you are eyeing

Those four cover almost every early- and mid-game decision.

One conversion you have to remember

The troop numbers on screen are the internal values divided by ten. This site publishes internal values because that is what the formulas are written in.

Gold has no such conversion. → How to Measure Distance On Screen

Further reading

• Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule — where the colour and the ratio come from
• What Attack Ratio Should You Use? — where to leave the slider
• The Game Interface — everything above the bottom bar
• Every Keybind — all 36 defaults