OpenFront Sierpinski Map — Where Terrain Does Nothing

Sierpinski is entirely plains. Its loss magnitude of 80.0 equals the plains coefficient itself, which makes it the theoretical floor — nothing can be cheaper.

The consequence is that terrain advantage does not exist on this map. Pushing anywhere costs the same, backing onto anything gives no bonus. What is left is position and economy.

Composition

Where it sits against the rest:

The same troops take 31% more ground than on Sol. Attacking is cheaper here than anywhere — which also means defending is not cheap, because no terrain is doing the work for you.

Nine nations — the names are the coordinates

A perfectly symmetric 3 × 3 grid. The map is a 1,400 × 1,400 square and Center sits at (700, 694) — almost exactly the middle.

That symmetry is the whole map. There is no “good spawn” in the usual sense. Every seat is terrain-equivalent, and the only difference is how many directions your border faces.

Seat quality is border count, and nothing else

Tiles conquered per tick scale with the number of contacting border tiles. With no terrain modifier available, that term is very nearly the whole of defence.

If you spawned Center, resolve one direction fast. You cannot hold four at once, and this map has no mountains or impassable ground to lean on. The only back wall available is water.

Defense posts matter more here

Since terrain contributes nothing, a defense post is the only defensive multiplier you can create.

plains magnitude 80  ×  defense post 5  =  effective 400

On other maps you can place one on mountains (120) for an effective 600. Here 400 is the ceiling. Still, 400 versus nothing is a different game — see defense post placement.

Find a narrowing and put it there. The ground is flat, but the landmass is a fractal, so narrow necks are everywhere.

Trade routes

With only nine nations, every pair is more than 300 tiles apart. Practically no combination falls below the threshold, which means you cannot pick a bad partner. The “port too close” trap that haunts every other map does not exist here.

Diagonals pay most — North West ↔ South East is 1,302 tiles.

Troop caps

At 582k land tiles this is a smaller map, so 1% is 5,830 tiles. The absolute tile count needed to reach the 80% FFA win condition is correspondingly lower.

Summary — what changes here

1. Drop terrain from your maths. Everything is magnitude 80. Pin the terrain selector to plains in the combat loss calculator
2. A corner gives you two borders instead of four. On this map spawn selection is almost entirely a border-count question → spawn selection
3. Defense posts are your only multiplier. Put them on necks first
4. Any port pairing works. Every inter-nation distance clears the threshold
5. Cheap attacks mean early expansion speed decides it → the one-minute opening build

Terrain shares, coordinates, and distances are counted directly from the game’s map files. Regenerated maps show up in the patch value history.