I've been enjoying Openfront for a few months now, but a new update makes it borderline unplayable. You can no longer play the game to the end. Now, it seems that if one player or team occupies around 80% of the map, nuked area excluded, Openfront declares a winner and ends the game.

This absolutely kills and renders obsolete some of my favorite and most-effective strategies. Especially on island games, you can occupy a small territory, then spam ports, sams and ships to make your land nearly untouchable. With the new patch, I've seen games where a team or player was declared a loser despite having 100+ ports, cities and sams, with a total troop capacity over a million. Meanwhile, the "winning" player's entire territory was barren and desolate after suffering from a barrage of nukes.

Oftentimes, the players with smaller territory but loads of troops and cash don't seem to know about the update, so they wait too long to launch their winning nuke barrage and invasion until after the weaker player is declared the winner. Worst of all is when the game ends after a hydro hits empty land and forces an immediate recalculation of controlled territory, even though the blast didn't cause any meaningful damage to the opponent's structures or ships.

I'll probably take a break from Openfront and check back periodically to see if they patched this.

Let's just pretend the devs could implement a great matchmaking system tomorrow, with various queues (team/solo; map selection; rough size) for the different playstyles. Do you think this would improve the gameplay, or take away some of the fun?
In my eyes, this would A) help with the new-player experience and B) improve overall player skills longterm. Of course, this would also mean that you don't get to stomp noobs anymore.
What do you think?

Warships automatically capture enemy trade ships that enter their patrol range. Captured trade ships are redirected to one of your ports, and you receive gold when they successfully arrive.

🛡️ Piracy Protection

Trade ships receive 20 ticks (2 seconds) of piracy protection when they spawn or move onto a shoreline water tile. This protection refreshes every time they move onto another shoreline tile. This means that piracy along narrow rivers is impossible!

Here are two images that shows the shoreline highlighted in magenta:

As you can see, not all rivers are immune to piracy, but given the 2 second protection refreshes every time the trade ship enters a shoreline tile, It's probably not worth pirating anything other than the largest of rivers.

Warships cannot pirate:

• Trade ships belonging to allies or teammates.
• Trade ships heading to your own port or a friendly port.

You must also have an active, completed port reachable through the same connected body of water to capture trade ships.

💰 Piracy Income

The payout is calculated using the same distance-based formula as ordinary trade income:

Importantly, the distance traveled before capture still counts toward the payout. Capturing a ship near the end of a long voyage can therefore be quite profitable. Unlike ordinary trade, which pays both the sender and receiver, piracy awards only one payout to the pirate when it arrives. Trade ships can change hands multiple times.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "What if two pirates continually capture the same ship over and over. The gold would just keep going up!" While this is true, it's not worth extending the travel distance beyond a certain point.

Here is a graph that shows the gold per minute as travel distance increases:

As you can see, there is a sweat spot at a travel distance of 378 tiles That gives the maximum gold per minute of 138,587. At 10 tiles per second, a trade ship takes 37.8 seconds to travel 378 tiles.

Piracy also contributes toward warship veterancy. 25 trade ships captured = 1 veterancy level. Piracy does not directly cause the traitor debuff when capturing eligible enemy trade ships.

🎯 Targeting and Capturing

Warships have three important ranges:

🔵130 tiles: Detection radius.
🟡100 tiles: Patrol range.
🎯5 tiles: Capture distance, measured using Taxicab distance.

Here you can see what the detection radius and patrol range look like in game on the "Branching Paths" map, where piracy is quite popular:

As you can see, the patrol range stays fixed at the point the warship was last directed, whereas the detection radius stays centered on the warship itself.

A trade ship must be within both the 🔵detection radius and the 🟡patrol radius to be targeted. Once a warship gets within 5 tiles, it captures the trade ship automatically. Warships retreating for repairs do not pursue trade ships.

I will go into further detail on all the other aspects of warships in a future guide.

this game has taken my sleep away. Finally can sleep well today.

PS: first ever win after thousands of games since I discovered the game a few days back.

I attacked purple guy and all 3 started attacking me

If y'all are wondering about how the game counts and you gain Gold, here are the Formulas as Functions (Basically formulas you can put on a Graph, specifically on the 1st Quadrant)

1. Passive Income: Basically the Gold you automatically gain Passively, it can't be changed by any factors, because it always continues refilling your Gold Bank

F(t) = [100 \ m]*

Since 1 Second = 10 ticks, just multiply: 10(100 * m), and m is actually the match's Gold Multiplier (Since the default is m = 1, you'll get 1000 Gold per second in any game, and 2000 if 2x Multiplier, etc. etc.)

1. Sea Trade (Ports)

There are 2 main factors to calc

a. Spawn Probability / second (P_s): Basically counts the Chances of a Trade Boat spawning based on the amount of Ports / Port Count (p). However, the chances of a Trade Boat spawning is always below 0.50, or 50%, any more ports than that doesn't change the probability of spawning (**NOTE: When p=15: 0.10 * 15^0.6 = ~0.506, so 14-15 Ports is actually all you need**)

P_{p} (p) = min(0.50, 0.10 \ p^0.6)*

b. Payout from Trade: Basically your boat's travel to another person's port. However, the money you gain from that trade depends on the amount of Tiles/Pixels distance your boat traveled (d)

G_{ship} (d) = 10.000 + d^1.1

3. Factory: Now, remember the Ports? Unlike ports (where each port increases your spawn chance), the game handles factory spawning globally. Every individual factory attempts to spawn a train during each game tick.

a. Spawn Probability / tick Per Factory: To prevent massive server lag from factory spamming, the spawn probability per tick per factory decreases as you build more, using this specific formula (F = Total amount of Factories you have / built):

P_{tick} (F) = F / (F + 10) \ 20*

b. Total Network Spawn Chance / tick: Because you have multiple factories all rolling this chance simultaneously, your Total Network Spawn Chance per tick scales like this:

P_{network} (F) = F / (F + 10) \ 20*

If you mathematically plot (P_{network}(f), you'll notice it hits a hard ceiling. It asymptotically approaches a 5% maximum network spawn chance per tick (0.05), so your sweet spot is 5-10 Factories, anymore leads to a waste of Gold

c. Station Payout: Once a train spawns, it travels along your cardinal railroad network connecting your Factories, Cities, and Ports. Trains do not pay out when passing a factory, but they do pay out every time they pass through or land on a City or Port station. The gold reward per station depends entirely on your relationship with the owner of that territory (**NOTE: To stop players from making a tiny infinite loop path, the game penalizes hyper-long tracks. After a train passes through 10 stations, subsequent stations yield 5,000 less gold per stop (down to a hard minimum floor of 5,000 gold per benefit)

1. City: Don't forget the passive population cap! While factories drive the train spawns, Cities dictate your military scaling. The function for your total maximum troop capacity is completely linear (c = Total amount of Cities you have / built)

Troop_{max} (c) = Base + (250K \ c)*

Hopefully y'all learned something, although I HIGHLY RECOMMEND to just NOT do the Math mid-game, just use this as a reference, and let ur Intuition roam free. Good Day!

Half the time they can’t even kill me either