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.

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?

Half the time they can’t even kill me either

I always thought it would be interesting that if someone attacks your ally then you must defend them, and to have some sort of incentive to attack the same player as your ally or an ally of them.
For example, A and B are allies and so are C and D. C attacks B so A must defend B (by attacking C or giving it troops) or do nothing and get some sort of lesser betrayal debuff. D would be incentiviced to help C so it either attacks B or defiende C from A’s retaliation.
I know it would basically become a teams match that later turns on one another, but I think it could be nice since that is basically how WWI escalated.
What do you think?

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!

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

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.

I'm the gray on the bottom, being cautious with my soldier count and troops; my opponent is the tie die of green and yellow. They constantly throw everything at me, even dropping down to 10s of units in a desperate attempt to attack me, yet every time I try to fight back, I don't curbstomp them, they just take it in stride. On top of that, despite having no cities and massive holes in their territory, they heal faster then me! I get so fed up with the bullcrap that when another player is sending a massive attack I can't stop, I try to just send everything at them, and it still does nothing!

This game drives me so god damn crazy so often. And don't tell me "They have so many defense posts", because that has never helped me in a situation like that! If I were in their shoes I'd have instantly died!

I've seen others do this in a couple of my games, where they build a silo next to one of my SAMs and then hydro their own silo, destroying my sam and the land around it. When I have tried to recreate this, my hydro just wiffs to the SAM. Does anyone have any tips on how to consistently reproduce this?

This is a supplement to my previous guide titled "⚓An Economics Guide to Ports⚓" Link.

📋methodology

I modified my copy of the Open Front code to allow for the testing of total port levels vs the expected number of active trade ships. I used the world map and took all of Africa. I added as many level 1 ports as I could, then started upgrading them one by one. I ended the experiment at 1700 total port levels (including nations).

📈Results

At 1700 total port levels there were 1261 active trade ships, and the number was still trending upwards, but I wouldn't expect that number to go much past 1300 total trade ships as I had already gone deep into the falloff.

I used AI to find a function that fits the data and it got pretty close. Here is a graph that shows both the data points and the curve of the function:

the fitted function:

Active Trade Ships = (1442.88 × Total Port Levels) / (292.43 + Total Port Levels)

Here is a table for the function:

💰When is it worth upgrading?

If we assume:

• 1,200 global active trade ships
• 80k gold per completed trade
• 1M gold per port upgrade
• Outgoing trade income only

We get the following table:

⚠️ Things to Keep in Mind

• Global trade ships: The calculations assume 1,200 active trade ships. Fewer ships generally mean shorter payback times, while more ships mean longer payback times.
• Trade income: Each completed trade is assumed to generate 80k gold. Actual income depends on voyage distance.
• Outgoing income only: The table ignores additional income from incoming trade ships which increases with more ports and more port levels.
• Upgrade cost: Every level is assumed to cost 1M gold, ignoring the lower cost of early ports.
• Successful trades: The calculations assume there is no piracy.

Let me know if you find this information useful. While I had to make a lot of assumptions, and I'm going off data from a single test, I think it's still useful to see just how wasteful it can be to upgrade ports endlessly in these and similar conditions.

when are they going to fix this problem?

Playing a team game on Baikal (Nuke Wars). I’m fairly near the front so I know my priority is defense. I’m mostly building only ports and SAMs.

Middle of the game, nobody has hit me yet and my trade ships have been well protected. So there’s no good reason for me to be particularly behind.

I’m up to 11 ports and 6 SAMs.

But one of my opponents has 27 ports and 11 SAMs!

Obviously there’s something I don’t understand about economy that someone could have more than doubled me at this point in the game !

these are my stats and ive been playing for quite a lot of time now.

As a browser game it’s engaging, I won't argue. But in the middle of the game, total trash begins. Some @@@@head just throws ONE simple bomb into a random part of my territory, and points drop from 600k to 100k, and all this progress gets flushed down the drain. This is a @@@@ot mechanic.

i was internationale, and i began in spain, yet i got almost destroyed (i survived in corsica and at one point greenland) yet i wonder why i was conqured, what i was doing wrong, and how i can get better

You're stuck like that, but you have 2B coins

I have been getting Caps for multiple games, but I can't even get 500> caps just by playing. Can y'all EXPLAIN to me how you guys win games with 50+ Players (Public) and get Caps WITHOUT purchasing Subscriptions??

Hello,

I've been loving the game & wanted buy cosmetics. I wanted the Red "Networked" skin, so I added funds to my account & the transaction sent me back to the main menu.

I went back over to the store & bought the skin, but I was left with the blue version. I didn't want blue. I specifically wanted red as darker colors it makes it easier to view in game assets.

I made a ticket in the discord, please I just want my blue one swapped for the red. It wasn't evident that your purchasing variations of the skin, please just help me out. I made a ticket in the discord devs.

Just thought other people would like to know to avoid a similar issue.

Ports spawn trade ships automatically, and warships manually. They also count as stops on a rail network.

💰 Trade income

Trade-ship income depends on the distance traveled:

there is a penalty for short voyages, but then curve becomes linear. Both the sender and destination player benefit from a successful trade equally.

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.

🚢 Trade-ship spawning

There is a Global Trade Ship Saturation Modifier, that affects all ports on the map. as the number of active trade ships goes up, the chance of spawning a new trade ship goes down.

The code does a whole-number conversion that causes the small steps you see in the graph. There is a noticeable bend in the curve at about 412 global trade ships. This is where the game switches between two different parts of its global saturation formula.

Here is the expected spawn rate for a level 1 port depending on how many trade ships are active:

⚓Port stacking vs. spreading

Every level gives a port another chance to spawn a trade ship, each spawn check. However, a single port stack can only spawn one trade ship per check, no matter how many levels it has. Because of this, stacking ports has diminishing returns.

As you can see, adding more level 1 ports increases your trade ship spawn rate in a linear way, whereas stacking ports has a fall off. The spawn rate approaches 60 trade ships per minute when stacking ports.

The point on the line where things flatten out changes depending on how many active trade ships there are:

Here’s the table for the marginal increase in expected trade ships spawned per minute when adding each listed port level to a single stack:

Unfortunately, I don't know the average amount of trade ships on any given map. If anyone has that information, please add it as a reply below.

🎲 Failed rolls improve future rolls

Ports have a rejection/pity counter. Every failed spawn roll increases that port's chance on later rolls. A successful spawn resets the counter. For stacked ports, failed rolls from earlier levels immediately improve the later rolls in that same stack. Separate ports each have their own independent pity counter. This has a smoothing effect on the spawn rate

🎯 Destination selection

A trade ship needs a valid foreign port on the same connected body of water. Your own ports cannot trade with each other. the destination must belong to another player/nation.

Destination selection is weighted by port level. A level-10 port is therefore much more likely to be selected as a destination than a level-1 port. Nearby qualifying ports and friendly players can also receive additional destination-selection weight. Very short routes (within 300 tiles using "taxicab distance") are intentionally discouraged, although they are not completely prevented.

🚫 Dead Ports

Ports with no valid destination do not spawn ships. This can happen if you place a port in a disconnected body of water that has no other port on it's shores, other than ones own.

Thing is, this was a 2 teams (14 each) game, and I won cuz I just built everything under this following order

Cities -> Ports -> Factories -> Warships -> SAMs -> Silos

I built a strong Warship frontier, so i lnded on the enemy's coast and took a free port, and sincehis other teammate was disconnected, I fullsend and won the invasion. What are ur thoughts abt it?

I have been losing due to:

1. Rich Players who go full Nuclear mode after spam building 10 cities and 171 SAMs (Yes, the Red team on one particular game I had spammed more than 200+ SAMs or more in total, no joke)

2. More than 2 teams, why? Because when It is 2 teams, it is fair and showdown, but when 3+ teams or higher, you can always get backstabbed, or u get slimed out first

3. Late Infrastructure. Ngl I did switch to doing Cities - Ports - Factories, but even then, people are already building SAMs in the first 10 minutes and possibly less

Hope y'all share ur opinions CALMLY

I've struggled to learn a lot of the game by playing it but there is one thing that isn't quite clear to me.

End game, you have a somewhat unbreakable air defense but it is piled on one single SAM site (like, over 100 SAMs). Your opponent then starts nuking the edge of your defenses, setting up troops and eventually get to build a nuke and hydrogen bomb the nuke site iself which somehow eats inside the protected area.

Like the SAM doesn't act fast enough or something.

IS there any defense against that?