Scorched Earth: Making Your Elimination Costly in FFA

Direct answer: how do I make my elimination costly?

Your elimination is a payday for the aggressor, and the single biggest piece of that payday is the Gold you are still holding when the last tile falls. A Human’s conqueror captures exactly 50% of your remaining Gold with integer division, and every city, port, missile silo, SAM launcher, and nuke you still own transfers to them as your territory flips one tile at a time. The lever you actually control is the Gold: spend it, donate it to a friendly, or burn it into Defense Posts before you die, because that is the one asset whose value you can shrink to near-zero on purpose. Pre-arm as many nukes as you can before elimination, because armed and in-flight warheads survive your death and still detonate on the aggressor’s core even though you are no longer in the match. Do not waste your last Gold on structures that hand the conqueror a free worker stream or a free launcher, and do not donate to a teammate who is not also threatened, because a donation that lands on a safe player is a free transfer, not a denial. The version boundary is v0.34.22, verified 2026-10-03, and every number below traces to that tag. The decision hierarchy, in the order you should run through it the moment you accept you are going down, is: first arm the nukes that have a clear flight path, because they are the only assets that survive you; second spend the remaining Gold into Defense Posts, which both cuts the capture and are destroyed on the flip; third, only if a threatened ally exists and donateGold is enabled, donate the balance to push the capture to near-zero. This is the eliminated player’s side of the same math the conqueror-side conquest gold guide covers from the other side, so read them together: that page tells the aggressor when finishing you is worth it, and this page tells you how to make finishing you the most expensive option left on the map. The whole strategy collapses to one sentence: move the Gold out of your own balance before the last tile flips, and load the warheads that will still fire after you are gone. The rest of this guide is the detailed ranking of those three levers, the two numeric scenarios that show the arithmetic, the failure modes that waste the strategy, and the mode and map adjustments that change which lever pays off most.

The elimination payoff table

Every asset you own at the moment of elimination resolves in exactly one of three ways: it transfers to the conqueror intact, it is destroyed with nothing paid back, or it survives you and keeps firing. Gold is the clearest case and the most decision-relevant. The conqueror runs a payout function that returns 100% of the balance for a Bot or a Nation, 50% with integer division for a Human, and 0 for a Human who has never sent a single attack. The game then removes your entire remaining Gold from you, so the conqueror’s captured share scales directly with whatever balance you still hold at that instant. That is precisely why the Gold you choose to spend or donate beforehand is the only number you can move, and the rest of this guide is a ranking of the ways to move it. The second case is the structure transfer: as conquest troops flip your tiles, every non-Defense-Post structure sitting on a flipped tile is re-owned by the conqueror at no cost to them, which is why the payoff of dying while rich in structures is so steep and why a last-minute port or city is almost never a good burn. The third case is the nuke: armed Atom, Hydrogen, MIRV, and MIRV-warhead units are explicitly excluded from the death cleanup, so they keep their flight timers and detonation logic running after the owner no longer exists, which is what makes a pre-death salvo the single highest-value denial on the map. Defense Posts are the exception on the transfer rule: when the last tile they stand on flips, they are destroyed and credited as a loss to you, so the conqueror gets nothing from them, which is exactly the property that makes them the correct sink for Gold you would otherwise lose at 50 cents on the dollar. The table below is the full disposition of every unit type at the moment of a human elimination, and it is the reference you should have open while you decide what to burn and what to keep, because the entire strategy is a prioritization of the rows in this table.

Two rows of that table do most of the work for a defender. The Defense Post row is the burn: it is the only structure whose value goes to the eliminated player’s column rather than the conqueror’s, which is why it is the correct sink for Gold you would otherwise lose at 50 cents on the dollar. The nuke row is the negative payoff: it is the only asset that does not reward the conqueror at all and instead damages them, which is why it outranks every structure on the keep list and should be armed first whenever a flight path exists. Everything in between is a transfer, and a transfer is exactly what you want to avoid on the tiles you know you are about to lose, because every city, port, silo, and SAM that flips over is a free stream the aggressor can immediately convert into the next conquest.

The death cleanup: what is deleted versus what survives

When your last tile is captured and the player object dies, the engine runs a cleanup pass that is easy to get wrong and impossible to skip. It removes your entire remaining Gold balance, deletes every unit that is not a nuke, and dissolves all of your alliances. In plain terms: the Gold the conqueror did not already capture does not go anywhere useful to anyone, the non-nuke units you built are gone, and any treaty you had is void the moment you die. What survives that cleanup is only the four nuke unit types, and those keep their flight timers and detonation logic running even though the owner no longer exists. Two consequences matter for a defender. First, anything you had not yet spent by the moment of death is simply destroyed by the cleanup, which means a high Gold balance is never a safe store of value on your own side: holding Gold is holding a check the conqueror can cash for half the face value, and the check is cashed before the cleanup even runs. Second, because nukes are the only class that survives, the entire keep-fighting-after-death strategy collapses into a single question, which is how many warheads you armed before your last tile flipped. If you spent your Gold on cities and ports right up to the end, you also handed the conqueror more worker and Gold streams, which is the exact opposite of the goal, and it is the most common mistake a player makes in the final seconds. The alliance dissolution deserves its own note, because it is the part players forget: the instant you die, every treaty you had is void, so any plan that depends on a teammate’s ongoing protection of your remaining tiles is a plan that stops working at the exact moment you stop being able to coordinate with them. The cleanup is deterministic and runs identically on every client, so there is no client-side trick to skip or shrink it; the only inputs you control are the Gold balance and the nuke loadout at the precise instant of death, and both are yours to set while you still have build time. That means the cleanup is not something you fight against, it is the fixed rule against which the three levers are measured, and getting it wrong is the difference between a denial and a gift, so the discipline is to treat the Gold balance and the armed nukes as the two live inputs and everything else as already lost.

Scenario A: 1.00M balance and you are going down

Assume you hold 1,000,000 Gold and 120,000 troops, your last cluster is three tiles wide, and the aggressor is about 180,000 troops strong and closing on the final tiles. If you do nothing, the conqueror captures 500,000 Gold, which is half of your 1,000,000 balance, plus every city, port, silo, SAM, and nuke you still own on the tiles they take. Now suppose you have thirty seconds of build time before the last tile falls. You can convert Gold into Defense Posts at 50,000 each, stepping to a 250,000 cap after the fifth post. Building five posts costs 250,000 and drops your balance to 750,000, so the conqueror’s Gold capture falls to 375,000 and the five posts are destroyed on the flip, worth nothing to them. You just traded 125,000 of captured Gold for zero conqueror value, which is a positive move on the scoreboard even though you still lose the cluster, and the posts also slow the conquest on the last tiles. The troops dimension is the reason the burn has to be timed to the same window as the flip: your 120,000 against their 180,000 means you cannot win the exchange, so the troops you commit to the last tiles are a denial, not a win, and the Gold you spend on the last posts is the only part of the response that permanently shrinks their payday. Push further and you can donate the remaining balance to a friendly player who is still alive, if you are in an alliance with them and the donateGold option is enabled, which drops your balance to near-zero and therefore the capture to near-zero as well. The cost is that the donation is permanent and the relationship becomes visible to everyone watching the map. The decision hinges on whether the aggressive neighbor is also threatening that friendly, because donating to them both shrinks the aggressor’s payday and funds your ally’s counterattack against the same enemy, which is the difference between a denial and a gift to a safe player. The arithmetic of the scenario is the same at any scale: every 100,000 you spend before the flip saves 50,000 of the conqueror’s capture, so the whole question is whether the spend is on a Defense Post (a pure denial) or on a structure that transfers (a partial gift), and on a small map where your slice of the total prize is large, the denial value is high enough that burning the balance is almost always the right call.

Scenario B: the nuke lever and leaving armed warheads

The strongest denial lever is the nuke, because it is the only asset that survives your death and keeps detonating on the aggressor. A Missile Silo costs 1,000,000 and, once built, can launch an Atom at 750,000 or a Hydrogen at 5,000,000. The community playbook, straight from the r/Openfront elimination threads, is to keep a couple of silos and a stack of Gold ready so that when you are about to be wiped you can launch a pair of Hydrogens into the aggressor’s own territory before your last tile flips. The warheads keep their flight timers after you die, so they land and detonate on the conqueror’s cities and ports even though you are no longer in the match. On a mid map where the aggressor’s core is one salvo away, two armed Hydrogens on their capital can erase more of their economy than the 500,000 Gold they captured from you, which makes this the highest-value pre-death action when you have a clear flight path and the target is within range of a direct trajectory. The timing of the launch matters as much as the loadout: the warhead must be launched before you die, because once it is in flight the owner no longer matters, but if you spend the Gold to launch it after your last tile flips, the Gold is gone and the silo has already transferred to the conqueror, so the window for the launch is the same thirty seconds as the build window in Scenario A. The counter-risk is that a MIRV costs 25,000,000 plus 15,000,000 per prior MIRV launch in the game, so a full MIRV strike is a late-game, high-commitment call rather than a mid-game default, and it is only worth it when the aggressor’s core is dense enough that a spread of warheads lands multiple hits. If you are the defender and the aggressor runs a dense SAM belt, a Hydrogen may be shot down before it lands, so the value of the nuke lever depends on whether your warheads can reach the target before the SAMs intercept them, which is why the which nuke to commit guide is the companion read: it analyzes the same SAM-interception trade from the attacker’s side, and here you are the one deciding whether to spend your last breath arming a strike that will still land after you are gone, which is exactly the asymmetry that makes the scorched-earth nuke the most expensive denial on the board.

When to burn Gold versus when to keep it

Burning Gold is not automatic; it is a conditional response to the state of the aggression, and the trigger is the aggressor’s committed troop count versus your remaining defense, not your own anxiety. If the aggressor has sent a full or near-full force and you cannot win the tile race, the marginal value of every unit of Gold you keep is 50% to the conqueror, and the marginal value of every unit you spend on a Defense Post is 0% to them plus a small slowing effect on the last tiles. In that regime, burn it without hesitation and arm the nukes first. The opposite regime is the one where the aggressor is probing with a small send and you still hold a realistic chance to defend the cluster; there, keeping Gold lets you top up a SAM or buy the troops to win the next exchange, so burning would be pure waste and the correct response is a normal defensive build. The middle case is the trickiest: the aggressor is big but not yet committed, and you are deciding whether to donate to a teammate. The rule of thumb is to donate only if the aggressor is also a direct threat to that teammate, because a donation is only a denial tool if the recipient can spend it against the same enemy, and a donation to a safe player is a free transfer that makes the next fight harder for your side. The AFK edge case is the one that inverts everything: if you are a Human who has never sent an attack, your elimination transfers 0 Gold to the conqueror no matter how much you hold, so the entire Gold-burn question does not apply to you and the only levers left are the nukes and the Defense Posts. A useful mental number anchors the whole decision: every 100,000 of Gold you spend before death saves the conqueror 50,000, so a 500,000 pre-death spend saves 250,000 of their payday, and that same arithmetic is exactly what the aggressor uses against you when they are deciding whether to full-send, which is the mirror covered in the conquest gold guide, and it means the two players are playing the same game on opposite sides of the same tile, so the correct response to a full-send is the full denial, and the correct response to a probe is to hold your Gold and win the exchange.

Aggressor counters and how the mode changes the math

A competent aggressor will read your pre-death spending and adapt, so the playbook has to survive their counters. The first counter is to full-send before you can pre-arm: if they commit the whole force, you have no build window and the nuke lever is the only thing that still works, which is why arming a warhead while you still hold a couple of silos and Gold in reserve is the highest-value pre-death action, and it is the reason you should keep a launch ready even in the mid-game. The second counter is to starve your Gold source instead of your troops: by capturing your cities and ports first, the aggressor cuts the worker and Gold streams that would otherwise fund your last build, so a scorched-earth defense that depends on burning Gold needs the burn to happen in the same window the last port falls, not ten minutes before, and that is why the timing of the burn is as important as the choice of structure. The third counter is the reputation one: if you have a visible history of expensive deaths, a bigger player may simply route around you and target someone cheaper, which is the most valuable outcome of the whole strategy, because the goal was never to win the elimination but to make you not the cheapest elimination on the map, and a player who dies rich is the cheapest target a large player will look for. The mode changes the weight of every lever. In a small FFA map your death is a large fraction of the remaining prize, so the payoff to the aggressor is high and the burn value is high too, and you should pre-arm earlier than on a large map, because the cost of an expensive death is proportionally larger. In a large map your slice is smaller, so a mid-game elimination of you is worth less to them and a donation to a teammate is cheaper relative to the threat. The starting-gold setting is the single biggest variable: with it on, even a passive Human is a Gold magnet, and the never-sent-an-attack 0-capture rule means an AFK player who never attacked transfers nothing, which changes the entire targeting calculus; with it off, only in-match Gold is at risk and the 50% rule applies only if you sent at least one attack, so the whole scorched-earth strategy is a function of the mode settings as much as of your own build choices.

Failure modes and the pre-death checklist

The most common failure is spending Gold on the wrong structure. A Defense Post is the correct burn because it is destroyed on the flip and gives the conqueror nothing; a city, port, silo, or SAM is the wrong burn because it transfers to them intact and makes the next fight harder for your team, so a last-minute port is almost always a gift. The second failure is donating to a teammate who is not also threatened by the aggressor, which turns a denial tool into a free transfer to a safe third party and can even tip the map toward the wrong player. The third failure is arming a nuke that cannot reach the target because the aggressor has a dense SAM belt; a Hydrogen that is shot down is a 5,000,000 loss that did not slow the conquest, so the nuke lever only works when the warhead has a clear flight path to the target before the SAMs intercept it. The fourth is the timing failure: spending the Gold ten minutes too early, when you still had a realistic defense window, so the denial was spent on a battle you could have won, and the aggressor then full-sends with no build window left on your side. The fifth is the AFK trap: a player who never attacked and is eliminated transfers 0 Gold, so if you are that player the scorched-earth Gold strategy does not apply at all and the only levers left are the nukes and the Defense Posts, and pretending the Gold burn works is a pure waste of the balance. The sixth is assuming the cleanup can be skipped; it cannot, it is deterministic and identical on every client, so the only inputs are the Gold balance and the nuke loadout at the instant of death, and any plan that assumes a client-side trick is a plan that fails the moment the last tile flips. Run through this list the moment you accept you are going down: confirm the aggressor’s committed troop count and pick the regime; arm the nukes that have a clear path; spend the rest into Defense Posts; donate the balance to a threatened ally if one exists; verify donateGold is enabled and the recipient is alive; and never waste the last Gold on a city, port, silo, or SAM, because every one of those is a free stream the conqueror converts into the next conquest.