Ranked Clan Wars: The Fourth Ranked Queue

Direct answer. Ranked Clan Wars is OpenFront’s fourth ranked queue: your clan is matched against up to three other clans, with two to five players on each side, in a team game on a normal-sized map with four hundred bots, a sixty-second spawn immunity, gold-and-troop donations, and a fifteen- or twenty-minute timer. Your clan gains or loses rating; you win by being the last clan with living players, or by a clan holding strictly more than eighty percent of the non-fallout land.

Ranked Clan Wars is the queue the community has wanted since the 2026 roadmap, and it is now part of the stable release: for the first time you can play ranked team games against a clan instead of a stranger-lobby team, and the rating that moves is your clan’s, not an individual’s. It shipped in the numbered stable v0.35.2 release on October 17, 2026. Every rule and number in this guide is verified against the v0.35.2 tag and its release body. If the numbers in your client differ from this guide, re-check the newer official release or tag. The rest of this guide covers what the mode actually is, how it differs from the three ranked queues you may already climb, the exact lobby contract (the two map pools, the immunity, the timer, and the tools that are on and off), the two ways a match can end, how the clan ELO is computed and whether the pool is fair, two concrete decision frameworks with numbers, the failure modes that will sink a new clan and the counterplay for each, and how to adapt to each map and read your climb. For the ladder-level rules all ranked modes share — the ELO system, the daily free-match budget, and rating protection — see Ranked Mode & Rating System.

What Ranked Clan Wars actually is, and when you can queue for it

Ranked Clan Wars is a competitive, clan-based team ladder. Where ranked 1v1 pits one player against one, ranked 2v2 pits one pair against one pair, and ranked FFA drops four to ten unaffiliated humans into one map, Ranked Clan Wars groups you with your clan members and matches your whole clan against up to three other clans. The unit of competition is the clan, not the individual: the release states the queue as “your clan vs. up to three others, 2–5 a side, the clan gains or loses rating.” The engine confirms the structure — RankedType.ClanWars = "clanwars" is the fourth ranked type in the engine API, sitting after OneVOne, TwoVTwo, and FreeForAll — and the game is built as a GameMode.Team match, so everything you do is for your team and against the other teams, not for yourself alone. The rating that moves after the match is the clan’s rating, because the player ladder is explicitly defined as everything except Clan Wars (PlayerLadder = Exclude<RankedType, ClanWars>): there is no personal rank you gain here, only the clan’s standing on the new ELO column. That single fact reframes the whole mode. You are not climbing a ladder of your own; you are climbing the standing of the group you belong to, which means your incentive is to make the team stronger, not to out-shine your own teammates.

The second thing to internalize is the version boundary, because it changes how much you trust the numbers. Ranked Clan Wars is a stable release feature. It shipped in v0.35.2, published on 2026-10-17, after the v0.34.x line. Treat that tag as the current fact boundary and re-check it when a newer official release changes the queue. Every fact here is therefore anchored to the v0.35.2 tag: the lobby recipe comes from getClanWarsConfig() in the server’s map playlist, the player and clan bounds come from the release body and the clan-wars assignment, the win logic comes from the ranked team win-check, and the rating lives in the external clan API. The third and most practical reframe is the entry gate. Two conditions control who can queue. First, you must be in a clan: the assignment that creates a Clan Wars game requires both a team roster and a set of clan tags, and the release confirms that “clan tags come from the clan wars assignment,” so a player with no clan has nothing for the matcher to group them under. Second, ranked play in general is now limited to trusted accounts — the release adds lock icons to the Ranked button and modal to show you when you are locked out — so a flagged or banned account cannot queue any ranked queue, Clan Wars included. Treat the “when can I queue” question as “as soon as the client ships the queue and your account is trusted and you are in a clan,” and treat the rest of this guide as the how.

How Clan Wars differs from 1v1, 2v2, and ranked FFA

The single most important thing to understand is that Ranked Clan Wars is not “ranked 2v2 with more people.” It is a structurally different queue with a different unit of rating and a different social contract, and the differences are not cosmetic — they change what you optimize on every turn. In ranked 1v1 you have exactly two humans and one job: beat your single opponent, and you can commit the entire economy and attention to one threat. In ranked 2v2 you have four humans across two teams, which adds a partner you coordinate with and can donate to. Ranked FFA removes the partner entirely and drops you into a field of four to ten solo players. Ranked Clan Wars brings the team back, but re-attaches it to a persistent social group rather than a match-made pair. You are not ranked against a random teammate; you are ranked with the people in your clan, and the opponents are other clans of similar standing, not strangers. The unit of competition is the clan, so the rating is the clan’s rating: a win moves your whole group up and a loss moves it down, and the release adds a sortable ELO column to the clan leaderboard so you can see exactly where your clan sits relative to every other one. That is the whole reason the mode exists — it closes the gap between “I can play ranked 1v1/2v2/FFA for myself” and “I can finally play ranked with my friends, and it counts.”

The second big difference is the roster and the tools. Ranked 2v2 is locked to exactly two teams of two; ranked Clan Wars scales to up to four clans with two to five players on each side, so a full Clan Wars game can have as many as twenty humans across four teams, or as few as a handful in a shorter lobby. The player count is a real strategic variable, not a fixed constant: the lobby is built from the actual matched assignment, and the timer and map pool both react to how many humans are in it (the small-lobby recipe kicks in at six or fewer players). The economy tools are the third difference, and the one most likely to surprise a player coming from the other ranked queues. Ranked 1v1 and ranked FFA strip out donations and Nations entirely, and ranked 2v2 keeps team donations but is a small, fixed game. Ranked Clan Wars keeps both Gold and Troop donations on, so your clan can move resources to a teammate under pressure the same way a public team game lets you, and it disables Nations, so there is no nation-selection advantage to build. The map is hard-locked to a normal-sized map with no compact variant, so every Clan Wars game is a slower, bigger-map attrition match. The fourth difference is the bots: every Clan Wars game is seeded with four hundred bots, so the map is dense and the early bot-clearing phase is a real, contested stage of the game rather than a thin formality. The table below is the four ranked queues at a glance; read the rows as the exact contracts the lobby recipe and the release enforce.

Contract	Ranked 1v1	Ranked 2v2	Ranked FFA	Ranked Clan Wars
Unit of rating	individual	individual	individual	the clan
Teams	1 vs 1	2 vs 2	none (solo)	up to 4 clans
Players per side	1	2	— (solo field)	2–5
Total humans	2	4	4–10	2–5 per clan (≤4 clans)
Map size	includes compact	includes compact	Normal only	Normal only
Map pool	small	small	6 continents	4 small / 6 large by lobby size
Spawn immunity	30s	60s	30s	60s
Donations	none	team	none	Gold + Troops
Nations	chosen	—	disabled	disabled
Bots	few	few	few	400
Match timer	20 min	20 min	20 min	15 min (≤6) / 20 min
Win	>50% of opponent	wipe / tile-share	>80% / last / largest	outlast / >80% tile-share
Account gate	trusted	trusted	trusted	trusted + in a clan

The practical read: queue Ranked Clan Wars as a big-map, donation-enabled, multi-clan attrition match where the rating that matters is your group’s standing, not your personal rank.

The lobby contract: two map pools, the immunity, and the timer

Ranked Clan Wars has a real, code-locked lobby contract, and it is the part of the mode that decides the tempo of every game before the first move. The first contract is the map pool, and it is not one pool but two, chosen by lobby size. The recipe checks whether the matched game has six or fewer players. If it does — the small case — it draws from a four-map pool: Australia, Iceland, Asia, and Europe Classic. If it is a larger lobby — the large case — it draws from a six-map pool: Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Australia. The map is picked once per match by a uniform random draw, so you cannot choose it and there is no map-pick mechanic; you land where the draw lands and you adapt. This two-tier pool is doing real strategic work. A small-lobby game on Australia or Iceland is tighter and faster, with fewer fronts to hold, while a large-lobby game on Africa or North America is a sprawling multi-front war. Reading the lobby size in the first seconds tells you which family of maps you are in and which tempo to expect.

The second contract is the spawn immunity, and it is the long team-mode window. Ranked Clan Wars uses a sixty-second spawn immunity — the same as ranked 2v2 and twice the thirty-second window of ranked 1v1 and ranked FFA. The reason is the team structure: with up to four clans of several players each, the map needs a longer early protection so the field can spread, set up its fronts, and establish its water control before the first real pressure starts. The practical consequence is that the first real fights in a Clan Wars game begin roughly a minute in, and the first minute is for reading the map, finding your front, and getting your clan’s boats out before the immunity ends. The third contract is the timer, and it also reacts to lobby size. A small game (six or fewer players) runs on a fifteen-minute timer; a larger game runs on a twenty-minute timer. Because the base win threshold is a flat eighty percent and the overtime rule that would lower it only starts after thirty minutes of play, the timer in a Clan Wars match never reaches the overtime drop — the threshold is a constant eighty percent from the first second to the last. That is a clean, stable contract: the map is not quietly getting easier to take as the clock runs down the way a thirty-minute-plus game would.

The fourth and fifth contracts are the tools that are deliberately on and deliberately off. On: Gold and Troop donations, so a teammate under pressure can be reinforced and the economy can be redirected to the front that matters. Off: Nations (no nation-selection advantage), random spawn (your starting position is not scrambled within a spawn pool), infinite Gold and Troops (the economy is real, not a free-for-all of free resources), and instant build. The sixth contract is the bots: four hundred bots seed every game, so the map is dense, the bot-clearing phase is a real stage, and the land you take from bots early is the land you spend converting into your eighty percent. Read the contract as a whole and the mode makes sense: a normal-sized map, a long immunity, a short-to-medium timer, a dense bot field, donations on, and no nation or spawn advantage — a clean, symmetric team game where the only inputs that differ between clans are the players.

How a Clan Wars match actually ends: outlast or take 80%

The win logic for Ranked Clan Wars is the ranked team-game win logic, and it has exactly two paths to victory. Understanding both, and knowing which one a given game is actually decided by, is the single highest-leverage piece of knowledge in this guide, because it tells you what you are playing for in the endgame. The primary path is outlast: at every win-check the engine counts the teams that still have at least one alive, connected human player, and the moment only one clan’s team still has living players, that clan is declared the winner. A clan “drops out” of this set the instant every one of its members is dead or disconnected, so the outlast condition is not “my clan has more land” but “every other clan is gone.” That is the same logic that ends ranked 2v2, and it means the cleanest possible win in Clan Wars is to eliminate the other clans one by one until you are the last one standing. Because the game is seeded with four hundred bots and the map is normal-sized, full eliminations of other clans take real time and real coordination; the outlast path is usually the endgame that a well-coordinated, numerically intact clan pushes toward.

The secondary path is the tile-share win, and it is the path that decides most matches. A team also wins the instant one of its members holds strictly more than the winning share of the non-fallout land. The winning share is computed as a whole-percentage threshold: the team’s owned tiles must be a strict majority of the threshold against the land that is not under nuke fallout, because fallout land does not count toward the win. The base threshold is eighty percent — the engine’s constant for the percentage of tiles owned to win — and the only mechanism that would change it is an overtime rule that starts lowering the threshold thirty minutes into a game. Ranked Clan Wars never reaches that point: the timer is fifteen minutes for a small lobby and twenty minutes for a larger one, both well under the thirty-minute overtime start, so the threshold is a flat, unchanging eighty percent for the entire match. There is one important guardrail on the tile-share path: a bot team can never claim the win. The win-check explicitly refuses to declare the bot team as the winner even if the bot landmass crosses the threshold, which is why a map that is mostly bot territory is not a win for anyone — it has to be a human clan crossing the line.

The practical read of the two paths together is that a Clan Wars match is decided by whichever condition is hit first: you can win by outlasting the other clans (every rival clan eliminated), or you can win by being the first clan to push strictly past eighty percent of the non-fallout land, and the tile-share path is usually the one that actually fires. This is a different endgame from ranked FFA, where the same eighty percent is a solo goal and the “last human standing” path is a single survivor. In Clan Wars the eighty percent is a team goal — it is your clan’s combined land, not yours alone — and the outlast path is a clan elimination of every other clan, not a wipe of a single opponent. Two concrete endgame reads follow. If your clan is numerically intact and the rivals are being whittled down, commit to the outlast path: keep your frontlines alive, trade kills, and let the attrition remove clans one at a time. If your clan is ahead on land but the rivals still have living players, commit to the tile-share path: push hard to cross the strict eighty percent before the rival clan’s counterattack knocks your numbers back, because crossing the line ends the match instantly and ends your exposure to elimination.

How the clan ELO is computed, and whether the pool is fair

The rating that moves after a Clan Wars match is the clan’s rating, and the release surfaces it as a sortable ELO column on the clan leaderboard. That column is the new thing you can act on: before this release, a clan’s standing was just an unsorted list, so you could not see where your group sat relative to the others at a glance. Now you can sort the whole clan field by ELO and see exactly how your clan ranks, which turns the leaderboard from a vanity list into a competitive tool. The ELO model behind the column is the same per-opponent-skill model the other ranked queues use, applied at the clan level. The community explanation from the ranked-points discussion is the clearest statement of how it behaves: the points you gain or lose depend on the skill of the opponent, so beating a higher-rated clan is worth more than beating a lower-rated one, and losing to a lower-rated clan costs more than losing to a higher-rated one. The practical consequence is that the system rewards the hard win: taking down a stronger clan is the single most valuable thing a Clan Wars game can do for your standing, and dropping to a weaker clan is the most expensive mistake. Because the rating is at the clan level and the player ladder explicitly excludes Clan Wars, the ELO you see on the leaderboard is a group number; it does not track your individual performance the way your 1v1 or 2v2 rank does.

The second question the community keeps asking is whether the matchmaking pool is fair — whether the matcher hands a small, balanced clan a field of evenly matched rivals, or whether it skews toward the biggest top-player clans. The released design is to match clans of similar ELO, and the assignment that creates the game is built from the matched clans, so the intent is a level field. But the pool is young and the community is still calibrating it, and the honest read is that the biggest, most skilled clans will cluster at the top of the ELO column and will play each other, while a newer or smaller clan will be matched against comparable newcomers. The community’s long-running worry about open-lobby teaming is the backdrop here: in public team games, the large established clans dominated the lobbies and the matchmaker struggled to balance them, which is exactly the problem a sanctioned, ELO-matched ranked queue is meant to fix. Clan Wars takes the clans that would otherwise be an open-lobby imbalance and gives them a ranked, skill-sorted home where they compete against their own weight class. The practical habit to build is to watch your clan’s ELO column over a stretch of games rather than reading a single result: one game is a small delta, but a trend across a dozen games tells you whether the clan is genuinely improving, holding its weight class, or sliding. And because the rating is the clan’s and not yours, the best thing you can do for the number is make the team better — fill your side, coordinate your fronts, and keep your key players in the game — because a stronger team is what actually moves the clan’s ELO in the right direction.

Two decision frameworks with numbers: push-and-consolidate vs. multi-front pressure

The first decision framework is the end-state choice, and it mirrors the one you already use in other team and FFA play: do you play to push and consolidate toward the eighty percent, or do you play to eliminate and outlast? In Ranked Clan Wars the two paths are weighted differently than in public team games because the rating is the clan’s and the map is a normal-sized, forty-bot field. The push-and-consolidate strategy is the right default when your clan is well-manned and the map is a high-land continent: you spread your clan’s cities across the two biggest land pockets, you convert the bot land early, and you defend the core while the rival clans bleed each other on the water and the pinch points. The number that drives it is the eighty percent: you are trying to own strictly more than eighty percent of the non-fallout land, and on a high-land map that is a large absolute number of tiles, so the strategy is patience and connectivity — you win by keeping your land connected and growing it while the rivals fight. The eliminate-and-outlast strategy is the right default when your clan is short-handed or the map is water-heavy: with fewer total humans or with the land broken into islands and bridges, pushing to eighty percent is slow, but eliminating rival clans one by one is faster, so you commit to removing clans until you are the last one standing. The concrete split: a full, well-manned clan on a big land continent plays push-and-consolidate; a smaller or out-numbered clan plays eliminate-and-outlast, and a water-heavy map always pulls toward the eliminate side because the land bridges are the only places a rival can be physically blocked.

The second decision framework is the tempo choice, and it is the one the community’s team-game footage keeps circling: how much do you push the front versus how much do you consolidate the core and extend the bot-clearing phase? The clearest community statement is that team games are “all based on spawn” — a good spawn sets you up for success — and the concrete plan is to push the front, consolidate the core, extend the bot-clearing phase, and keep boats out on the other fronts. Translated into Clan Wars numbers: in the first minute, under the sixty-second immunity, your job is not to fight but to establish — place your opening cities on the widest land bridges, get your clan’s boats out before the immunity ends so you control the water, and start clearing the bot land that will become your eighty percent. The number that matters in the midgame is the donation: because Gold and Troop donations are on, the highest-leverage move is often not the biggest donation but the donation placed where it is most effective — sometimes giving your full donation to a frontliner who was just nuked is the best decision of the game, because it restores the front that is about to break. The counterplay is symmetric: when a rival clan pushes your front, you push back, because the community’s repeated observation is that the side that fails to answer a push concedes the front and the water with it. Two concrete scenarios make the split clear. Scenario A: your clan is up two players per side on a high-land map, the bots are mostly cleared, and one rival clan is pushing your central front — the read is to consolidate the core, donate to the pushed frontliner, and play push-and-consolidate toward the eighty percent rather than over-commit to a counterattack you can ill afford. Scenario B: your clan is one player short on a water-heavy map with two rival clans still fully alive — the read is to abandon the slow eighty-percent push, target the weakest rival clan, and play eliminate-and-outlast, because on a broken map the fastest way to a win is removing a clan, not owning a percentage.

Failure modes and the counterplay for each

The failure modes that sink a new Clan Wars clan are predictable, and each has a concrete counterplay. The first is the coordination gap: you queue Clan Wars with a clan, but the clan is not actually coordinated, so the match degenerates into the same uncoordinated scrub team the community complains about in public lobbies. The whole point of the clan tag is that it is the coordination signal — the footage that asks “is winning a team game without a clan tag possible anymore” exists because the tag is what lets a group recruit and trust each other. The counterplay is to make the tag real before you queue: agree on the front lines, agree on who is the frontliner and who is the backliner, and agree on the donation policy, so the clan is a team the moment the immunity ends rather than a list of five strangers who happen to share a tag. The second failure mode is the naval neglect: a clan that never gets its boats out loses control of the water to the first rival that does, and the community’s team-game critique is blunt that the first side to get a boat out often controls the water for the rest of the game. The counterplay is to treat the boat as a first-minute objective, not a midgame luxury: under the sixty-second immunity, get at least one boat out on each front you care about, because the water is where a rival can invade and turn a defensible land position into a losing multi-front collapse.

The third failure mode is the donation timing error: a clan that donates the maximum number every time, or the minimum, and only rarely the right amount at the right place. The community critique is explicit that troop-donation timing is less about maximizing the highest number you give and more about paying attention to where it will be most effective, and that placement is where most players are simply bad. The counterplay is to make the donation a decision — a specific amount to a specific frontliner at a specific moment — rather than a habit, and to reserve the full donation for the moment a key frontliner is about to break. The fourth failure mode is the over-commit: a clan that pushes the front too hard, over-extends, and then cannot push back when the rival answers, because the community’s repeated lesson is that the side that fails to answer a push concedes the front and the water. The counterplay is to keep a reserve and to push back the instant a rival front pushes you, rather than committing the whole economy to one target and leaving the rest of the map open. The fifth failure mode is the release-edge uncertainty, which is specific to a newly shipped queue: clan-tag bugs or matchmaking anomalies can still occur, and the pool is still being calibrated, so a result that looks unfair may be a bug rather than a skill gap. The counterplay is to treat a single anomalous result as data to confirm across a second game rather than a verdict on the clan, and to re-verify the lobby contract against the shipping tag if a number in your client does not match this guide. The sixth failure mode is the rating-chasing error: a clan that queues only to farm easy wins against weaker clans instead of the hard wins that the ELO model rewards. Because the per-opponent-skill model means the big point swing comes from beating a stronger clan, the counterplay is to take the weight-class match and play to win it, not to stack easy games, because it is the hard win that actually moves the clan’s ELO in the right direction.

Mode and map adjustments, and how to read your clan’s ladder

The final layer of Ranked Clan Wars is adaptation: how you change your play for the two map families, and how you read your climb now that the clan’s standing is a sortable number. The map adjustments are where the two-pool lobby contract stops being a list and starts being a decision tool, and the ladder reading is where the mode’s whole purpose becomes concrete. The four small-lobby maps (Australia, Iceland, Asia, Europe Classic) and the six large-lobby maps (Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia) split into the same two strategic families you already know. The high-land family — compact, connected continents where most of the map is solid, connectable territory — is the “spread and consolidate” family: your opening cities go on the widest bridges, you spread into the two biggest land pockets, and you play the push-and-consolidate strategy toward the eighty percent. On these maps the game is about connectivity and patience; you win by keeping your land connected while the rival clans break around you. The water-heavy family — long coastlines, internal seas, broken archipelagos — is the “pinch and eliminate” family: your opening city goes on or next to a land bridge a rival needs, you target the smallest clans in sequence, and you play the eliminate-and-outlast strategy toward being the last clan standing. On these maps the land bridges are the only places you can physically block a rival, so you own them early and use them to force eliminations. The concrete adjustment is the same one you already use: on a high-land map, consolidate and spread toward the percentage; on a water-heavy map, own the bridges and push for the elimination; and on any map, your biggest contiguous land block is your lifeline, so you never sacrifice it to chase a percentage or finish a push.

The lobby-size adjustment is the one that is new to this queue. Because the timer and the map pool both react to whether the matched game has six or fewer players, your strategy has to flex to the actual lobby size, which you learn the moment the match starts. In a small game — six or fewer players on the four-map pool with the fifteen-minute timer — the field is thin and the eliminate-and-outlast path is usually right: with fewer clans, removing one or two drops you to the last one standing, and the eighty percent on a smaller field is a slower, harder path. In a larger game — the six-map pool with the twenty-minute timer — the field is denser and the push-and-consolidate path is usually right: everyone is fighting over the middle, so you spread into the open land, clear the bots, and let the rival clans bleed each other while you grow toward the eighty percent. The adjustment is simple: small lobby, eliminate; larger lobby, consolidate. And in either case the sixty-second immunity, the forty-bot field, and the donation tools are the same, so your first-minute map-reading and boat-placement are the same — only your midgame end-state flexes to the lobby size. The last adjustment is the one that changes everything about why you are playing: your results now move a clan ELO that is visible and sortable. The practical change is that you can finally see your group’s standing at a glance, and you can measure the clan’s progress by its rating rather than by a screenshot. The habit to build is to watch the trend of the clan’s ELO column over a stretch of games, treat a loss as data about which failure mode the clan fell into, and make the team better — fill the side, coordinate the fronts, time the donations — because a stronger team is what moves the number. Ranked Clan Wars is the fourth ranked queue, and it is the one that finally gives organized teams a ranked, skill-sorted home. Read the lobby size, pick your end-state in the first minute, play toward the eighty percent or toward the elimination, keep the water, and climb the clan’s ladder. For the shared ladder rules — the ELO system, the daily free-match budget, and rating protection that apply to all ranked modes including this one — see Ranked Mode & Rating System. For how to read the win conditions across all modes, see Win Conditions. For how this queue compares to the free-for-all ladder it sits next to, see Ranked FFA: The Third Ranked Queue.