OpenFront Wiki & Strategy Guide

OpenFront is a massively multiplayer real-time strategy battle royale: hundreds of human players (plus AI nations and bots) fight for territory on one shared map. You expand tile by tile, build an economy with cities, factories and ports, negotiate and betray alliances, and escalate to nuclear weapons in the late game. It runs free in the browser at openfront.io and is open source (openfrontio/OpenFrontIO on GitHub).

Steam Early Access was announced for 17 September 2026, with cross-play against the browser build and a browser version that stays free. This wiki tracks mechanics as they exist in the live build — start with the wiki hub for definitions, or the beginner guide if you are playing your first match.

1. Spawn and claim land — pick a start position during the spawn phase, then expand into neutral territory. Fresh spawns get a short immunity window (5 seconds by default).
2. Convert land into growth — more tiles raise your maximum army; cities raise it further and unlock more income options.
3. Build an economy — cities, factories and ports produce gold; ports and factories feed trade ships and trains that travel through other players' territory.
4. Turn gold into structures or weapons — troops grow continuously toward your maximum, so gold is usually spent on buildings, not bought troops.
5. Attack where the math is good — the attack ratio you send decides how fast a border moves and how many troops you burn; see attack ratio.
6. Survive the endgame — alliances break, missiles and MIRVs appear, and matches are decided by territory control.

Last verified: 2026-09-14 · v0.33-era build · release, price and player-count claims change; this page is re-checked against the official store page and announcements.

OpenFront is match-based: nothing carries between matches except your skill and your account cosmetics. The modes that matter most for strategy are:

• Free For All (public) — hundreds of players, temporary alliances of convenience, highest variance. How to win in FFA
• Team games — shared objectives and shared borders; spawn placement and role division decide most games. Team strategy
• Ranked 1v1 / 2v2 — part of the v0.33 line; smaller maps and much tighter margins. Land combat fundamentals
• Custom and private lobbies — bots, difficulty, instant build, infinite gold/troops and optional timers change the value of every building.

Strategy sites age badly when they guess. Everything here is written from one of three source types, and the volatile parts carry a date:

• Official game build — costs, timers, growth formulas and keybinds are read from the open-source game itself, then re-checked when a new version lands.
• Official store and announcements — release, platforms, cross-play and player-count claims come from Steam or official community posts.
• Community heuristics are labelled — rules of thumb that circulate in Discord and Reddit (like the 42% growth rule) are marked as community-derived, never as official design.

No fabricated numbers: if a value is not confirmed for the current build, the page says so instead of printing a plausible-looking figure.

These six pages cover the whole decision surface of a match: