OpenFront Team Play — The 80% Win Condition

Team games end when your team holds 80% of the land, combined. Same bar as FFA, but split across a team — so economy and troop distribution start to decide them.

The most wasted resource in team play is troops sitting at a teammate’s cap. Those troops have stopped growing. Moving them is a straight net gain.

The numbers

The donation dialog opens at a third of your troops and you can adjust it. Donating straight from the radial menu follows the attack ratio slider instead, per the game’s own help text.

Why donating troops is a net gain

The 42.2% rule does its heaviest work in team games.

Growth per tick is (10 + troops^0.73 / 4) × (1 − troops / cap). That second factor goes to zero as you approach the cap. A teammate at 90% of cap has effectively stopped growing.

Hand those troops to a teammate sitting at 30%:

• The sender’s ratio drops, so their growth restarts
• The receiver gets troops they can spend immediately
• Total team troop production goes up

If a teammate has the “approaching troop limit” warning on their control panel, that is your team leaking resources. It appears past 80% of cap.

The receiver has a job too. Stacking donated troops just moves the problem — only accept troops when you have something to spend them on.

If you spawned in the rear, push troops forward

This is the most common leak in team games. Spawn somewhere that never borders the enemy and you never spend troops — so they pile up, and piled-up troops do nothing.

Here are the numbers. A teammate holding 5% of Europe with 10 city levels (cap around 4.8M), troops gained per minute:

Production stops dead at the cap. Hoarding in the rear takes you there, and from that point you contribute nothing while continuing to sit on a full bar.

Sending just the default one third drops you from 95% to 63% of cap, which brings growth back 5.5×. The troops get used at the front immediately and your own production restarts. Neither side loses.

Three things to know before you send

1. Only the recipient’s headroom transfers. The limit is their cap minus their current troops, and if they are already full nothing moves at all — the transfer simply does not happen.

So timing matters. Right after a front-line teammate commits a big attack is when the most will fit. Pressing donate while their bar is full accomplishes nothing.

2. Ten seconds per recipient. The cooldown is tracked per person, so you can send to teammate A and then immediately to B.

3. You must be on the same team or allied. Some lobbies disable player-to-player troop donation entirely.

Troops do not count toward winning — territory does

The win condition is 80% of territory, combined, and if the Doomsday Clock is on, its bar is combined territory too. Both count land, not troops.

Hoarding in the rear moves neither number. There are exactly two useful options:

• Send them forward — a front-line teammate converts them into land
• Spend them yourself — if there are still bots or empty ground behind the line, this is better still: no coordination needed and the team’s share rises directly

The only bad choice is doing neither.

Donating gold

Gold behaves differently. There is no cap, so hoarding it leaks nothing.

So donate gold only with a purpose:

• A teammate who cannot get to three cities — the highest-value use there is
• Somebody saving for a MIRV — 25,000,000 gold is punishing to reach alone
• A single defense post that would seal a team border — 50,000 gold makes a front disappear

Gold sent without a purpose just raises the odds it ends up with the other team.

Splitting roles

A team that all plays the same way duplicates the same weakness four times. Split by the terrain each of you has.

Factory rails pay far better in team games. A train earns more per stop the less of it is yours: 35,000 gold for an allied building, 25,000 for a teammate or third party, 10,000 for your own. And a foreign stop pays you and its owner in full — the team nets double. Place teammate buildings within 15–110 tiles of each other and everyone’s income rises together.

Disconnected teammates are absorbed for free

This one is barely known.

Attacking a teammate who has disconnected sets your loss coefficient to zero.

You take the territory without losing a single troop, and no traitor mark. If somebody leaves, do not leave their land sitting — absorb it into the team’s share. Every tile the other team takes instead pushes 80% further away.

The control panel tells you outright that disconnected teammates can be attacked.

Focus fire with target markers

Target in the Info menu stamps a marker on a player that the whole team can see. It lasts 10 seconds, with 15 seconds before you can mark again.

The most common way teams lose is four players pushing four directions. Pick the thinnest opponent by Density Hunting, mark them, and hit together — the same troops buy far more land.

Closing out the last stretch to 80%

Late on, the final 5% stops moving. Usually one of three reasons:

1. A remnant wedged in a corner — check whether it can be encircled first. If so, it costs nothing
2. A chokepoint sealed by a defense post — a frontal push eats ×5. Route a boat to coast outside the 30-tile radius
3. An island — without a port and boats you cannot reach it at all. Secure a port ahead of time

Nukes finally pencil out at this stage. Against a remnant with troops packed tight, one atom bomb earns its six-cities price. But fallout adds a defense multiplier to that land afterwards, so aim at troops you want gone, not land you want to take.

Further reading

• Named OpenFront Strategies — the seven standards
• Game Modes and Options — win conditions and modifiers
• Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule — why donating is a net gain
• Troop Cap Calculator — check a teammate’s ceiling