Playing an OpenFront Public Lobby, In Order

The skeleton of a public game is: expand at 20%, first city at 125,000 gold, then ports, then alliance management, then nukes. Where it goes wrong is almost always dragging the wilderness phase on too long.

Below is that game written out from spawn to endgame.

🟢 confirmed in the game’s source · 🔵 an observation from play. Observations can be wrong; when one gets confirmed or refuted, this page changes.

1. Opening — 20% into wilderness, and get to water

Set the slider around 20% and click the unclaimed land around you.

The one thing that matters here is making sure you own land that touches water, because you need a port. Landlocked, every option later in this page disappears.

2. Do not spam clicks — one every two seconds

🟢 This is the single biggest early-game difference, because of the shape of the growth formula:

gain per second ∝ (10 + troops^0.73 / 4) × (1 − troops / cap)

The first term scales with the troops you currently have. Spam-clicking keeps your home count near empty, troops^0.73 collapses, and your production collapses with it.

🔵 In play it splits like this:

The totals look similar, but the second accumulates much faster — and those troops make the next expansion faster still.

If counting the beat by hand is awkward, run the Opening Timer alongside the game. It clicks the two-second rhythm for you.

→ Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule

3. Out of wilderness? Tribes next — bank 7–8K and go

Once the unclaimed land is gone, move on to neighbouring Tribes.

🔵 Here you want to bank 7–8K and push once at around 30%. The opposite of wilderness: taking land fast is what raises your cap and gets production climbing again.

🟢 Attacking a Tribe multiplies your losses by ×0.7 — 30% more land for the same troops.

4. Meet a player, offer an alliance

🔵 Eating Tribes eventually puts you against a player. Ally if you reasonably can.

Trading blows from the early game is a pointless attrition war outside of specific situations. Keep it up and you ruin each other while the neighbour who spent that time growing eats you both. Unless it is a two-team game like 32v32, ally and grow.

To offer: right-click them, then the hand icon. A handshake appears beside their name once it takes.

🟢 Alliances lapse automatically after 5 minutes. To keep one you have to re-offer after it drops. Miss the expiry and at some point you are simply attackable again.

→ What Happens When You Betray an Alliance?

5. Ports first — factories first if you are landlocked

🔵 A port is the fastest route to gold. Build one as soon as conquest gold allows. If you cannot reach water, build a factory first instead.

🟢 With factories, the point is routing through other people’s cities and ports. A factory pays nothing itself; income depends on who owns the stops.

Passing other people’s buildings pays 2.5–3.5× more. The alliance from step 4 pays off a second time here. And spread factories rather than stacking levels — a station sends at most one train per check, so for the same gold the spread build produces over 20% more. → Factory and Rail Income

🟢 For ports, distance is everything. The trade income curve bends at 300 tiles apart, and the income is concentrated in the 200–400 band. Press M to count it — on World Normal one grid cell is 100 tiles.

→ Where Should You Build Ports? · All Six Buildings

6. Under attack? Push the front back and forth

🟢 A defense post gives ×5 attacker losses and ×3 slower advance within 30 tiles.

🔵 That enables a specific routine:

1. Let them come inside the post’s radius
2. While their troops grind down, attack lightly to push the front back
3. When they push again, keep the post alive and repeat

You can hold a long time this way. The whole thing depends on not losing the post.

→ Defense Post Range and Placement

7. Do not betray — go by sea instead

🟢 Attacking an ally marks you a traitor for 30 seconds, and while marked your defense is halved. You just get rolled.

🔵 So when you need more land, an amphibious invasion beats a betrayal.

• From coastal land, right-click another island or continent to land
• 🟢 A warship sinking your transport kills everyone aboard. Stay outside the 100-tile patrol radius
• Their ports are the priority target. That cuts their economy directly
• The moment you gain any ground, plant a defense post and expand from it

Cut the waist, then pincer

Instead of pushing a front head-on, land in the middle, cut their territory in half, and eat both halves.

The best shape is your land — an ally — your land, wrapping around. That alliance lapses eventually, and when it does, that land is what you eat next.

8. Spread out your silos and SAMs

🟢 SAM reload is 9 seconds. Two missiles inside that window means one gets through.

⚠️ The game’s own help says “7.5 seconds” and that value is stale. SAMCooldown() in the source is 90 ticks at 100 ms per tick — 9 seconds. The help also gives range as “100 pixel”; level 1 is actually 70 tiles, converging on 150 only as you upgrade.

So trusting a SAM and clustering your buildings means losing all of them at once. Unless you are truly cramped, spread out.

🔵 You can also exploit it. With two or more silos, fire two missiles at once at a location covered by a single SAM and one lands.

Their missile silo is always target number one. After that, wherever they clustered cities or ports.

→ When to Use Nukes

9. Late game — nuke the city cluster first

🟢 A city raises the troop cap by +250,000 per level. So destroying cities drops their troops in one stroke.

🔵 The standard late-game land grab:

1. Nuke where their cities are concentrated
2. Their cap collapses and troops drain — push in immediately
3. Even if they nuke back late, your troops are already eating their land and they have nothing left to hold with

This is a window where striking first is worth a lot.

10. Team games — clear Tribes at the back, then feed the front

🔵 In two- or three-team games, if you spawn at the back you must clear the Tribes near you and then support the front line. Growing alone in the rear is a net loss for the team.

To support: right-click an ally — the middle button sends troops, the left sends gold.

🟢 Troops sent through the radial menu follow the attack ratio slider (20% by default). The donation dialog defaults to a third of your troops with a 10-second cooldown.

🔵 Send 30–40% repeatedly rather than everything at once. That keeps your own production up so you can keep supporting.

Gold goes to ports, factories and cities as needed, then straight to a missile silo. And the moment you see the other team building a silo, destroy it.

If you want to play defensively, build more ports, factories and SAMs, and send gold to whoever holds the front.

→ Team Play

Further reading

• OpenFront in Five Minutes — start here if you are new
• The 1-Minute Build Order — the first 60 seconds, second by second
• Single-Player on Hard — terrain, landings, encirclement
• Reading the Bottom Bar — how to read the numbers on screen