Measuring Distance in OpenFront — The M Grid

Guides throw around “30 tiles” and “400 tiles”, but the screen has no ruler. So this page comes first. Three answers: press M for the grid, watch the circle the game draws while you build, and read the leaderboard.

Everything else on this site assumes you can do these three things.

1. M is your ruler

Press M and a coordinate grid appears over the map, with cell labels like A1 and B4 — useful for calling out positions to teammates too.

The cell size is never printed on screen. It is derived from the map dimensions, so it differs per map.

On World Normal one cell is exactly 100 tiles. It is the easiest map to build your intuition on.

Now the distances in the rest of the guides turn into instructions you can follow:

Holding Space for the alternate view brings the grid up automatically.

2. Four things you never have to measure

Pick a build icon, move the cursor onto the map, and the game draws the range for you. Only four units do this:

For these four, forget the numbers. Move the cursor until the circle covers what you want covered.

Two caveats:

• Only the outer radius is drawn for nukes. The inner total-kill radius (12 for atom, 80 for hydrogen) is not, so treat the middle of the circle as far deadlier than the edge
• The circle turns red if the placement would cross into allied territory — a warning that building there can break the alliance

Enemy SAM coverage is drawn too

While you are holding a Missile Silo, SAM Launcher, City, or either bomb — or just hovering those build buttons — every SAM on the map shows its range as a dashed circle.

Green is yours, yellow is an ally, red is an enemy.

Aiming a nuke goes one better: if the shot crosses enemy SAM coverage the trajectory turns red and shows an X. You get a yes/no answer without measuring anything.

→ When to Use Nukes · All Six Buildings

The two with no circle — ports and warships

Ports and warships get no range circle at all. Those happen to be the two most-quoted distances in any guide, so they are the ones you actually have to count on the M grid.

• Ports: aim for 3–4 grid cells apart on World Normal
• Warships: the targeting range (130 tiles) is longer than the patrol radius (100 tiles) — roughly a third of a cell further than the circle you imagined

→ Where Should You Build Ports?

3. Defense posts: read the border, not the radius

Once a defense post is built its circle disappears. Instead, the protected stretch of your border turns into a checkerboard pattern.

This is better than measuring. You never need to know where 30 tiles ends — the checkerboard stops exactly where the protection stops. Trace your border and any plain segment is a hole.

The checkerboard only appears on border tiles. Interior tiles inside the radius show nothing.

→ Defense Post Range and Placement

4. What the leaderboard gives you

The leaderboard is the only window you have into other players. Four columns show by default; the gear icon turns on the rest.

Turning on the building columns changes how much you know.

• SAMs at 0 means a nuke lands unopposed
• City levels × 250,000 is how much of their ceiling comes from cities
• A launcher on the board means you can be nuked — build a SAM before you need it

⚠️ Those columns are level sums, not building counts. Three cities upgraded to level 2 shows as 6. You cannot tell three from six.

5. The Owned % is useless early

Territory share is printed to one decimal place. Anything under 0.1% reads 0.0%.

On Europe you will read 0.0% from your 52 spawn tiles until you pass 2,000. Managing the early expansion by percentage does not work. Use the troop growth rate at the bottom of the screen early, and switch to the percentage in the mid game.

To turn a percentage back into tiles, feed your map and the reading into the Troop Cap Calculator.

Fallout tiles drop out of the denominator, so after a nuclear exchange everyone’s percentage rises without anyone taking land.

6. Troop numbers on screen are one tenth

This is the one that trips everyone up.

The troop figures the game prints are the internal value divided by ten.

This site publishes the internal values because every formula is written in them. When you compare against the screen, drop a zero.

Gold has no such conversion. What you see is what the code uses.

7. Time is on screen

Elapsed match time sits in the top right as mm:ss. The 0:25 and 1:30 markers in the 1-Minute Build Order refer to that clock.

Build times and reloads are shown as progress bars under the structure, never as a countdown. Watch the bar fill.

Further reading

• The Game Interface — panels and icons
• Every Keybind — what else is worth learning besides M
• Troop Cap Calculator — Owned % into tiles