OpenFront Spawn Selection — How to Pick Your Start
Every OpenFront spawn gives you 52 tiles and 25,000 troops. Coast or inland, how many bots are nearby, and what terrain surrounds you decide the next five minutes.
The short version
- Everyone starts identical — 52 tiles, 25,000 troops. The spot only decides how cheaply you grow from there
- No coast means no trade income at all. Without a port an entire gold channel is missing
- More bots nearby is better. Attacking a bot costs 30% fewer troops
- Backing onto a map edge shortens your border, and border length is the area you have to defend
Every player starts the same: 52 tiles and 25,000 troops. The spot you pick does not change that — it changes how cheaply you expand over the next five minutes.
Four things matter, in this order: coast → nearby bots → terrain → what you can back onto.
The numbers at spawn
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Starting territory | 52 tiles |
| Starting troops | 25,000 |
| Troop cap at that size | 121,411 |
| Fill ratio | 20.6% |
| Minimum distance between players | 30 tiles |
Pick a map in the troop cap calculator to see what the cap looks like there.
20.6% is below the growth peak of 42.2%, which means growth is still accelerating right after you spawn (see why your troops stopped growing). Saving troops early buys you nothing — spend them on tiles.
1. Coast or inland — the biggest fork
No coastline means no port, and no port means zero trade income. An entire gold channel simply does not exist for you.
There is a catch: trade revenue hinges on a 300-tile threshold between ports, so a coast with only close neighbours earns very little. See port placement.
| Position | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Coast with distant coastline visible | Best |
| Coast, but tucked inside a narrow bay | Ports work; income disappoints |
| Fully inland | No trade — but no landings either |
The inland upside is real: with no shore on open water, amphibious attacks cannot reach you at all (see stopping amphibious landings). You are trading trade income for a shorter list of ways to die.
2. How many bots are nearby
Attacking a bot costs 30% fewer troops. Most early expansion is eating bot ground, so bot density is expansion speed.
A human neighbour right next to you inverts this. You cannot kill them inside a minute, and hitting them just adds a front. The standard answer there is not to attack but to ally — see the one-minute opening build.
3. Terrain — is this ground cheap to push through?
Expansion cost scales directly with terrain.
| Terrain | Loss magnitude (unitless, highland = 100) |
|---|---|
| Plains | 80 |
| Highland | 100 |
| Mountain | 120 |
Plains around you is the early-game gift; mountains are the opposite. But mountains cut both ways — expensive to push through means cheap to defend behind. The ideal shape is plains in your expansion direction and mountains or map edge at your back.
Terrain mix varies enormously by map. World is 34% plains while Europe is 57% — the same troops buy very different amounts of ground.
4. What can you back onto?
Tiles conquered per tick scale with the number of border tiles in contact. A shorter border means slower losses (and slower gains when you are the one attacking).
Three things work as a back wall:
- Map edge — no border at all in that direction. The most reliable
- Impassable terrain — attacks skip these tiles entirely, so it behaves like a map edge
- Mountains — magnitude 120 makes them expensive to cross
A narrow neck — a peninsula or an isthmus — does the same job. One defense post on a neck stacks ×5 losses and ×3 slower advance onto a single square (see defense post placement).
Putting it together
Work down the list:
- Does it touch open water — and is there distant coastline to trade with?
- Are several bots nearby — downgrade a step if a human borders you immediately
- Is your expansion direction plains?
- Is there something to back onto — edge, impassable, mountain, or a neck?
Almost no spot satisfies all four. Secure 1 and 2 first and treat 3 and 4 as bonuses, because early gold and expansion speed decide everything that follows.
Once you have picked, the first minute runs to a script — see the one-minute opening build. If this is your first game, start with how to play OpenFront.
One more thing worth internalising: a city beats tiles by a wide margin. At 52 tiles, one city level takes your cap from 121,411 to 371,411 — matching that with land alone would take thousands of tiles (20,000 tiles gets you 861,462). So really the question for a spawn is “can I earn city gold from here?” See how many cities.