The coming update has trains and factories! The game is mainly about managing compounding growth with discrete losses (having more land and cities increases you population cap, and your population follows a logistic curve, so you want to reserve an amount of population to maintain growth, and it's programmed so that you want to use a discrete amount for attacking instead of a constant trickle)

A good strategy that works well for me is to prioritize moneymaking and win by cleaning up a nuclear wasteland. Some tips for that strategy aka trademaxxing:

* The fastest way to make money is to get lots of ports and ally with people near and far. Boats give you more gold depending on their distance traveled

* Set up turtled-in bases on islands and have warships patrolling near them to shoot down potential land invasions. This combined with your small land area will make it less appealing for the big countries to focus on you

* Once you have enough funds for a MIRV, maintain strategic deterrence by having multiple missile silos - so you can launch the MIRVs any time

* Continue to trademaxx and wait for the big countries to nuke each other into oblivion

* Once the time is right (and you have enough funds for multiple MIRVs), move in to clean up the nuclear wasteland. Get some cities but don't spend too much money. If another country starts attacking you at this point, you can MIRV them again. You are also much more resistant to MIRVs since your assets are in money instead of structures and can rebuild quickly

It is open source! Check out to GitHub and discord to contribute!

https://github.com/openfrontio/openfrontio

It is heavily inspired by territorial.io .

One of the contributing devs made an open source version: warfront.io, which openfront is forked from and then heavily developed.

Warfront did not have any multiplayer so Evan, the creator of openfront, made it multiplayer and together with contributors made lots of new features.

Recently there has been some new activity on the warfront repo. Warfront added webgl rendering, and hopefully Openfront will have be inspired. Openfront does not work nicely on mobile and low end devices currently.

• diggan

  today at 8:55 AM

  > Recently there has been some new activity on the warfront repo

  Yeah, seems there is a for-profit company running the show now, so expect some squeezing in the mid-to-long term.

  Also, latest gameplay change seems to be trains, anyone had time to play around with it yet? I've played quite hours of Openfront and not sure how I feel about the train addition yet.

  • psc007

    today at 12:17 PM

    For-profit company running warfront or openfront?

    All the developing of openfront is done for free by contributors, unless something changed the last week or so

    • diggan

      today at 12:39 PM

      > For-profit company running warfront or openfront?

      Talking about OpenFront. Seems to be run by a "OpenFront LLC", supposedly based in "SACRAMENTO, CA 95816" according to their privacy policy. Playwire (A "revenue amplification company") is also involved somehow into the operations, as you get redirected there when you hit "Advertise with us" link, I'm guessing they might be the publisher or something?

      As for the actual people working on the codebase, it seems like there are two main authors which based on the activity seem to be full-time employees working on the project, or at least contractor-based.

      • openfront

        today at 4:17 PM

        I'm the creator of OpenFront. I created an LLC mostly for tax purposes, but I maintain 100% ownership. No publishing company involved.

        Playwire is ad company I'm partnering with. I recently quit my job to work on this full time, so need to figure out some form of monetization.

        • diggan

          today at 5:37 PM

          Thanks a bunch of clarifying all the details! Maybe worth putting the info in some FAQ or somewhere on the website as well, always good to have somewhere for when people go looking :)

          Thanks a bunch for OpenFront as well, it's a really fun game I've spent lots of hours with already, although it's really hard :P Excited to see how the trains will be worked in, but it's also really enjoyable as it is so again, thanks for working on it!

        • oaiey

          today at 5:49 PM

          Thanks for the game!

• pastage

  today at 12:18 PM

  On mobile I go for Coop and try hard to just support other players, by giving troops to the right player. Having good backend players is vital in Coop.

  Sadly communication and cooperation is very hard.

You must plant your nation during the generation fase, otherwise you wont exist in the game!!! (took me 10 minutes to figure out)

• swiftcoder

  today at 9:02 AM

  Yep. I had to lookup a tutorial on YouTube to figure out what I was doing wrong...

• ivolimmen

  today at 8:33 AM

  Thank you; I thought I was the only one that did not get that

A quick guide on how to not get destroyed right away:

    Select a grassland patch somewhere on the edge without many players around, many bots and an access to a see/river. More advanced version would be to start in a center and do more diplomacy later.

    Send 20% of troops right away when game starts, then move a slider in a bottom left (attach ratio) to 35% and expand every time you get 40% of your population (like 6k, 8k, 10k checkpoints). Avoid PvP.


    When there are no more free land left, start conquering bots. Try to encircle them, because you will annex them without spending troops, otherwise just try to get ones located on mountains last, because there's a penalty on mountains. You'll get gold every time you finish out the nation, spend this gold on cities first, then ports and some good forts to defend yourself.


    The shift from PvE to PvP must be deliberate and opportunistic. Only attack when you have an advantage like when they're busy with another war, too expanded. Get some allies because breaking an alliance gives a penalty. Don't rush to conquer as it will make you weak in a short term.


    Pick a strategy for your mid-game:

        City-Maxxing - this strategy involves investing heavily in Cities to achieve an enormous maximum population cap. A player with many cities can field a colossal army, aiming to overwhelm opponents through sheer numbers and a rapid troop regeneration rate. This is a land-centric, brute-force approach. 

 
        Trademaxxing - this strategy focuses on building numerous Ports to create a vast trade network. The goal is to generate immense quantities of gold, which is then used to fund a powerful navy and a large nuclear arsenal. This is a sea-centric, wealth-based approach that aims to win through economic and technological superiority.


    In the late game build Missile Silos and SAMs in fortified, mountainous locations, break some alliances with a huge attach armies, or break defenses with nukes.


    To win launch MIRV on a biggest threat and swarm the area

If you're planning on diving in, the linked "how to play" video is two minutes long and gets the basics across very effectively: https://youtu.be/jvHEvbko3uw

Super addictive. To be fair, I still don't really get what the best strategy is, especially at the beginning, so I'm getting steamrolled by human opponents pretty easily...

• sparsely

  today at 8:48 AM

  I can't work out what the best ratio of soldiers/workers in. It seems that for the first 30 seconds or so you need almost all soldiers to expand fast, but after that?

  There's a lot of luck involved too, sometimes you'll just get dogpiled by two neighbours and there's not much you can do, but at least it's fast.

  • diggan

    today at 12:00 PM

    > I can't work out what the best ratio of soldiers/workers in.

    In the beginning I tried out a bunch of ratios and never found any strategy that seemed to have worked. Now I just leave it on default for entire runs, won a handful of times in free-for-all, seems to work out OK for most cases.

    In the first ~1 minute or so I keep 1K soldiers "at home" at all times, and whenever it goes above, I send them out in the "non-taken land", so basically medium-sized expansions until there is no land left. Then start attacking bots in the order of the money they have available, and once there is no bots left, start attacking humans.

  • firejake308

    today at 11:28 AM

    IME, ports generate way more income than workers, so I go for pretty much fully soldiers

• Jyaif

  today at 8:49 AM

  Your population growth depends on your population size, so you have to not over expand at the beginning.

  Get allies at the beginning so that you may aggressively conquer bots without worrying about being conquered. Those ally may cross you, but they'll have a penalty so they are disincentive to do so.

  • pastage

    today at 1:03 PM

    It is amount of population and how much room is left so you want to continuously kill off soldiers to have a good growth/conquer ratio.

    • Kinrany

      today at 2:35 PM

      The speed of capturing depends on the ratio of soldiers attacking/defending. It appears to be better to accumulate extra soldiers and then do a big push

I'ts fun, I think it needs queues for different game modes because with 150 players you almost always get horded by neighbours. Being able to queue for a team game would make it a bit easier to learn I think

• diggan

  today at 9:55 AM

  There is a singleplayer mode too, which is how I learned to play before jumping into multiplayer.

ended nuking my self by mistake and tanking my run, wish it was in a separate menu than all the buttons for building stuff, I assumed clicking it meant I was building more nuclear facilities.

Haha - what is going on? How do I play this?

Is there a way to get more UI or feedback?

20 years ago I was addicted to a game like that named Globalcombat.com. Good times. Few years ago it was still alive. Now it seems gone.

• ivape

  today at 9:15 AM

  Risk Games are kind of niche but have a hardcore base. Check out Risk Legacy SC2 custom map, and Line Wars on Steam.

  • pantulis

    today at 9:24 AM

    I would argue that Risk games are not that niche, but I am currently too busy conquering 18 territories with 2 armies at least.

    • ivape

      today at 10:41 PM

      I'm speaking for its place in video games. Stuff like Hearts of Iron and Diplomacy are birthed from Risk but are extremely niche. In fact, for fully graphical video games, they often have board-game like communities (the games have no QoL systems like match making, you'll have to organize it yourself on Discord). For example, the QoL to be able to jump into a lobby like the one posted here is not available in $50 dollar Risk-like/Diplomacy-like games. You can't even do that in 4x grand strategy multiplayer games. It's a got a long way to go. It took some time until all the concepts of DND got fully fleshed out into graphical RPGs and MMOs. I hope the same happens with the Risk-line of games, but it may also forever be niche.

      This game right here is a offspring of SC2 Risk Legacy map:

      https://store.steampowered.com/app/1309610/Line_War/

      Inspired form (imho):

      https://sc2arcade.com/map/1/181632/

      Both games have a small, dedicated community. Line wars usually require people in Discord to gather people for games.

      The compelling thing about Risk games is that once you make it past the early game, it quickly shifts into a sophisticated social game where you have to LARP geopolitical diplomacy since most countries/armies are too big (entire sovereign nations) by the end game.

By no means Risk-like IMO - territorial.io-like.

A feature request would be a [Rage Quit] command that simulates flipping the table when I'm playing against siblings who keep taunting me while they crush my armies.

Raaaaaaugh!!!

Very addictive. Beware.

Love this game, fast paced multiplayer that's super strategic.

this looks cool but I'm really struggling to figure it out. I started a single player game which was really confusing until I realized I needed to click somewhere to choose my starting position.

Another rabbit hole. Great experience.

I would have given it a try if you didn’t implement that deceptive GDPR notice with 30 switches you have to manually unselect

been playing this for months, absolutely love it

You need to make it clear what my starting position and color is.

• diggan

  today at 11:58 AM

  It's where you click and then the node that has a thick yellow outline around it. But I agree, the whole startup/placement sequence should be made a lot more explicit and user friendly.

  • ivape

    today at 10:41 PM

    It's very fixable. Everything else is amazing, I love it.

I discovered this game through Ultimus Rex's Youtube channel. I recommend watching him play a couple times before diving in.

https://www.youtube.com/@ultimus_rex40

• petercooper

  today at 10:52 AM

  Another good player to watch is Corgi Circus who came to the game through being popular in the Territorial.io world, a similar but far simpler game: https://www.youtube.com/@CorgiCircus – https://territorial.io/ is worth playing as an alternative if you only have 5 minutes to spare though but the strategy is quite simple.

  • hombre_fatal

    today at 11:27 AM

    The last thing I need in my life is to get competent at these quick pick up and play multiplayer browser games. Sheesh.

• diggan

  today at 11:53 AM

  What's the fun in that? Almost half the fun of finding a new game is discovering how it works by trial and error. Watching hours of someone else playing a game I just picked up seems self-defeating. Are there really people who want to start new games and being good at them from the get go?

  • remram

    today at 8:29 PM

    Different people enjoy different things. Personally I don't have much interest in playing but I did enjoy watching Ultimus Rex's gameplay while doing other tasks.

• therealbilliam

  today at 7:29 PM

  same! popped up on my youtube feed and i've been watching almost everyday