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
The end game is pretty unpolished, like how you stack buildings in a repetitive way, or spam buildings using a UI quirk instead of a simple quantity system, or invade a single pixel and then build buildings on that pixel.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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
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
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...
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
And woe be unto you if you're on macOS because there are no scrollbars to indicate that the start button for single player is hiding offscreen
Look, I will never forgive Apple for choosing such horseshit, but on the other hand it's been that way for so many years that now if a site doesn't indicate more content is available to the user, it's no longer Apple's fault
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.
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
Here's a video of what all that looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm87u9ebUxg
The end game is pretty unpolished, like how you stack buildings in a repetitive way, or spam buildings using a UI quirk instead of a simple quantity system, or invade a single pixel and then build buildings on that pixel.
So I'm curious how they'll decide to clean it up.
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.
> It is open source! Check out to GitHub and discord to contribute!
Yes and no: https://github.com/openfrontio/OpenFrontIO/blob/f0e9f97a7f6d... is 404
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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!
Thanks for the game!
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)
Yep. I had to lookup a tutorial on YouTube to figure out what I was doing wrong...
Thank you; I thought I was the only one that did not get that
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
A quick guide on how to not get destroyed right away:
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
IME, ports generate way more income than workers, so I go for pretty much fully soldiers
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
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.
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
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.
The last thing I need in my life is to get competent at these quick pick up and play multiplayer browser games. Sheesh.
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?
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.
same! popped up on my youtube feed and i've been watching almost everyday
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!!!
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.
Risk Games are kind of niche but have a hardcore base. Check out Risk Legacy SC2 custom map, and Line Wars on Steam.
I would argue that Risk games are not that niche, but I am currently too busy conquering 18 territories with 2 armies at least.
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 from (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.
Seeing offensive usernames, you will want to filter those.
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.
And woe be unto you if you're on macOS because there are no scrollbars to indicate that the start button for single player is hiding offscreen
Look, I will never forgive Apple for choosing such horseshit, but on the other hand it's been that way for so many years that now if a site doesn't indicate more content is available to the user, it's no longer Apple's fault
You need to make it clear what my starting position and color is.
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.
It's very fixable. Everything else is amazing, I love it.
Love this game, fast paced multiplayer that's super strategic.
Very addictive. Beware.
I would have given it a try if you didn’t implement that deceptive GDPR notice with 30 switches you have to manually unselect
Haha - what is going on? How do I play this?
Is there a way to get more UI or feedback?
been playing this for months, absolutely love it
By no means Risk-like IMO - territorial.io-like.
Another rabbit hole. Great experience.