FFA Focus: When to Team Up and Take Down the Snowballing Leader in OpenFront

Direct answer: when the crown is rolling, the field wins by committing together before the bar moves

The short result: in a late FFA where one player’s territory share keeps climbing while everyone else holds still, the rest of the table wins only by coordinating. One attacker always loses the fight, because the leader’s full defense answers one threat while every other player watches. The moment two independent armies can hit the leader’s land at the same time, the defense splits, and the leader’s economy advantage turns into a problem instead of a guarantee. Form the alliance early — before the leader has allied with the strongest challenger or crossed the win line — and commit only when two attacks land together, not when you feel brave. If the lobby runs Overtime, the bar falls two points every minute after minute 30, which quietly does the focus for you: the leader’s winning share shrinks each minute, so the timing question shifts from “can we break through” to “how much of the wall do we need to break.”

This is the exact standoff the community keeps describing: the big player looks untouchable, everyone agrees they are too strong to take, and the game ends on the 80 percent line with the same player who was ahead at minute 20. That outcome is not a bug and not bad luck. It is the default math of the win condition. The 80 percent threshold is a fixed line, territory share only grows when you build, and the default rules give nobody a free reason to be the first attacker. The first attacker is the one the leader can focus with full strength, so rational play without an agreement is “wait,” and waiting is exactly what the leader wants. The only way out of that standoff is an explicit coordination move: an alliance with one or two other players, timed so that the alliance’s first committed attack happens before the leader’s SAM ring and bunkers are complete, and so that at least two of the allied attacks reach the leader’s land in the same minute.

The rest of this guide prices every part of that move against the v0.34.24 constants. You will learn when the alliance itself is worth the cost, what the 30-second traitor window actually does to the attacker’s defense, how many attackers are enough to split a leader’s SAM network, how the MIRV price ladder changes the final kill order, and how Overtime — when the host turns it on — rewrites the timing entirely. The working definition of success for this decision is simple: after the focus lands, no single player on the board can cross the 80 percent line alone inside the remaining minutes, and at least two of the attackers are strong enough to keep the leader’s rebuilt share from recovering. If the focus does not meet that definition, it was a delay, not a kill, and the game returns to the same standoff with everyone poorer.

Why the crown snowballs: the 80 percent line plus compound growth

The snowball is mechanical, not personal. Three facts in the v0.34.24 rules make a lead self-reinforcing. First, the win condition is share, not net worth: a player wins by owning 80 percent of the usable tiles on the map. That line is PERCENT_TILES_OWNED_TO_WIN = 80 in the game configuration, and it does not move unless the lobby enables Overtime. Second, the only way to gain share is to build on unowned or enemy tiles, and every minute a player does not build, the denominator of their potential share shrinks relative to the map. A leader who is at 30 percent at minute 20 on a 50-tile usable map is only 40 tiles from the line, while a player at 12 percent is 70 tiles from it, so the same 10 tiles of growth move the leader meaningfully closer to the bar and the challenger barely at all. Third, economic output compounds: factories, ports, and research scale with existing holdings, so a player ahead has more output per tile, more tiles per minute, and a faster path to the line than anyone behind them. The gap is not a fixed number of tiles; it is a growing ratio.

The defensive side compounds too. The leader’s SAM network is denser because they built it earlier, their bunkers and walls sit on the border of a larger territory, and their reserve is larger in absolute numbers. When a single challenger attacks, the leader answers with that full reserve and that full SAM coverage, and the attack loses to a defense that has had twenty more minutes to grow. When the challenger retreats, the leader has lost a fraction of a reserve but gained the challenger’s destroyed buildings and sometimes tiles, so the gap widens by the attack itself. This is why the community’s repeated phrase is “attack the crown you cowards”: the game is literally waiting for someone to make the coordinated move, because no individual move is affordable.

The one counter to the snowball that exists in the default rules is the attacker’s own economy: if the field stays divided, the leader cannot take their land, because attacking three small players at once costs more than it returns, and the leader’s own win bar still has to be reached. The snowball therefore runs until one of two things happens: the leader crosses 80 percent and wins, or the field coordinates and the defense splits. There is no third outcome in the default rules. Overtime is the fourth outcome the host can add, and it is a slow, automatic version of the field’s focus: the bar falls, the leader’s winning share shrinks, and the game is decided by whoever can hold the smallest possible share. Understanding which of the four outcomes your lobby is in is the first decision, and the version-boundary section below lists the exact constants that determine it.

Version boundary and the six constants this decision turns on

Every number in this guide is read from the v0.34.24 tag of the OpenFrontIO source, the release published 2026-10-06, and the six constants that decide this game are: the win threshold, the Overtime defaults, the traitor window and its two debuffs, the alliance duration, the alliance-request timing, and the MIRV price function. Reading them from the configuration at that tag gives: the win bar is 80 percent of usable tiles; Overtime is off by default, and when a lobby enables it, the required win percentage drops 2 points per minute after minute 30 with no floor; the traitor window is 30 seconds, during which the traitor’s defense counts at half strength (0.5) and the defender’s retaliatory attack cost is scaled by 0.8 (attacks land 20 percent cheaper and faster); the alliance duration is host-configurable from 1 to 15 minutes, with a 5-minute default and a 0 value that disables alliances entirely; a standard alliance request stays active for 20 seconds with a 30-second per-target cooldown; and the MIRV price is 25M base plus 15M per MIRV already launched anywhere in the game, a game-wide counter that increments on launch even if the strike is later intercepted.

Two boundary notes matter before you apply the guide. First, the traitor debuffs are asymmetric in the way that matters here: the breaker becomes the traitor, and while the traitor is the defender, it is the attacker’s cost that drops, so the ex-ally’s retaliation against you is cheaper and faster for the 30 seconds, and your own defense is halved. The cost of breaking an alliance is therefore not a symmetric risk; it is a 30-second loan of your own defense, and the rest of the field’s focus math has to absorb that loan. Second, the Overtime cadence in this guide is the v0.34.24 value of 2 points per minute; the v0.33-era overtime guide on this site cites a 1-point-every-30-seconds cadence under v0.33.11, and if you are on an older build the bar falls at a different rate, so check the build before you time a focus against a falling bar. If the room has custom or disabled alliances, the 5-minute lull this guide assumes does not apply, and the timing of the alliance and the break shifts accordingly.

The version fact that the whole decision turns on is the first one: the bar is a fixed 80 percent line by default. Everything in the community’s “nobody attacks the crown” standoff is a consequence of that line being fixed while the leader’s share climbs toward it. The second most important fact is the MIRV price function, because the final kill of a focus is a nuke sequence, and the price of that sequence is a global counter, not a private budget: every MIRV any player has launched this game makes the next one 15M more expensive for everyone, including the leader. Those two constants — the fixed bar and the global MIRV ladder — are the two numbers you must know before you decide whether to focus, and every scenario in this guide is priced against them.

The alliance decision: when the field should team up, and at what cost

The alliance is the coordination primitive that makes the focus possible, and it has a real price. The price is not gold; it is the loss of free movement against the ally for the alliance’s duration, and the risk that the ally uses the lull you buy them to grow their own share at your border. The alliance duration is the main dial: a 5-minute default alliance is long enough to plan and launch a two-front attack on the leader, and short enough that if nothing happens inside it, the relationship returns to neutral and you can pivot. A host-set 1-minute alliance is too short to move a reserve and launch nukes, so it is a signal rather than a tool; a 15-minute alliance is a de facto side in the game, and taking one means you are committed to the field’s outcome for a quarter of an hour. The decision is therefore: does the board need a 5-minute coordinated attack on the leader right now, or does it need a 15-minute side in a longer endgame?

The timing of the alliance is the second half of the decision, and it is earlier than most players think. The alliance is worth forming the moment two conditions hold: the leader’s share is climbing and the leader has not yet allied with the strongest challenger, and at least one other player on the board is within striking distance of the leader’s land and would be attacked by the leader if they were not currently neutral. In the second condition sits the whole value of the alliance: a neutral player within range is a free extra attacker once allied, because the leader cannot focus them without leaving the main front exposed. If the leader has already allied with that player, the field’s focus is harder, not impossible — it now requires the remaining attackers to split a two-player defense instead of one — and the price of the focus goes up accordingly.

The cost side has three parts. First, the traitor risk: if the alliance breaks, the breaker takes the 30-second window with the 0.5 and 0.8 debuffs and the relation drops, so the alliance must not be treated as a permanent wall; it is a timed agreement whose expiry you plan around. Second, the border cost: while the alliance is live, you cannot attack the ally, so if the ally starts growing at your shared border, that growth is bought with the alliance, and the focus must pay for it. Third, the opportunity cost: the reserve you hold for the focus is not building or defending elsewhere for the minutes you hold it. The practical test is whether the focus’s expected gain — the leader’s share dropped below a level where they cannot win alone inside the remaining minutes — exceeds those three costs inside the alliance’s duration. If it does, form the alliance; if it does not, the leader’s growth is not yet fast enough to threaten the bar, and the field should keep building and wait for the next, better window.

The commit decision: what the 30-second traitor window does to a coordinated strike

The commitment is the moment the focus actually lands, and the 30-second traitor window is the price of breaking the agreement that made the focus possible. Read the window as a loan: for 30 seconds, the ex-ally’s attacks against you cost 20 percent less and land faster (the 0.8 speed debuff applied to the defender’s retaliation), and your own defense counts at half strength (the 0.5 defense debuff). The window is not a general weakening of the whole board; it is a specific, known interval in which the ex-ally has a cheaper, faster path onto you, and the focus only pays if the payoff of the strike is banked inside that interval. If the focus takes four minutes to finish the leader’s SAM ring and the alliance breaks at minute one, the window closes at minute one and thirty, and the leader’s surviving defense answers a focus that has already paid its traitor cost without having won.

That is why the coordinated strike is timed, not just aimed. The two (or three) attackers break or act at the same minute, and the first minute of the strike is spent on the leader’s outer SAM ring and bunkers, because those are the units that kill the focus’s troops before they reach the leader’s economy. The traitor window, if the focus came out of an alliance, sits on top of minute one: the ex-ally’s retaliation is cheapest and fastest exactly when the focus’s troops are most exposed on the leader’s border. The practical rule is that the focus’s reserve must be able to hold a 30-second cheaper, faster attack on its own home front while the strike is in the SAM ring. If the reserve cannot hold that, the focus is one army too thin, and the correct move is to add a third attacker, to delay the strike until the reserve is rebuilt, or to not break the alliance at all and let it expire naturally, keeping the lull for another full duration.

The second half of the commit is the relation drops, which are the hidden cost the focus often under-prices. The breaker takes a -100 relation drop toward the ex-ally and a -40 drop toward every nearby neighbor, and in a crowded FFA the nearby set can include several of the other small players, so the break is not a two-player event; it is a neighborhood event. The -40 drop to the neighbors means that for the minutes after the focus, the players who were neutral toward you are now slightly hostile, and the leader’s surviving defense can count on a few extra arrows pointing at the focus’s homes. The focus therefore has to be strong enough to win with a slightly hostile neighborhood around it, not just strong enough to beat the leader. That is the difference between a focus that ends the game and a focus that ends with the leader at 20 percent and three attackers each exposed to a -40 neighborhood for the rest of the match.

Attacker count and defense split: how many armies it takes to break the crown

The leader’s defense advantage against a single attacker is the whole reason the snowball holds, so the focus’s first job is to remove that advantage by making the leader defend two or more fronts at once. The split math is simple in direction even if it is hard to price exactly: a leader with a reserve of 150 troops and a SAM ring covering two borders can answer one 60-troop attack with the full reserve and the full SAM coverage, and win that attack. The same leader against two simultaneous 60-troop attacks on two borders has to split the reserve and the SAM coverage, and each front meets roughly half the defense, which is usually not enough to stop two well-timed strikes. The attacker count that makes the split is therefore two for a standard leader, and three when the leader has a third border that is defended by a dedicated garrison or a bunker line, because then the reserve has to be split three ways and the SAM coverage is stretched across three frontiers.

The timing of the simultaneous arrival is what makes the split real. Two attacks that land five minutes apart are two separate fights, and the leader wins the first, rebuilds, and wins the second. The focus has to plan for both attacks to reach the leader’s land in the same minute, which means the two attackers must start their moves at different times if they are at different distances, so that the longer-marching army arrives at the same minute as the shorter one. The alliance is what makes that coordination possible: without an explicit agreement on the launch minute, the two small players each act when they are ready, and the leader faces them one at a time. With the alliance, the launch minute is a shared plan, and the focus’s troops arrive together, which is the only way the defense split actually happens.

The third attacker is the insurance, not the requirement. Two well-timed attacks break a standard leader’s ring; a third attacker, usually held in reserve behind the second front, is what finishes the kill when the leader’s reserve survives the first two minutes and turns. The third attacker also covers the case where one of the two primary attackers is slightly weaker than the plan assumed, because the split then falls to two and a half fronts instead of three, and the leader’s defense is still stretched. The price of the third attacker is the reserve cost and the border exposure of holding a third army, so the field should add the third attacker when the leader’s reserve is large enough that two fronts are a coin flip, or when the leader’s SAM network is dense enough that the first two minutes of the strike will not clear the ring. In practice, the field reads the leader’s visible reserve and SAM count and picks two or three attackers to match, and that reading is the single most important observation the focus makes before it commits.

The nuke settlement: the MIRV price ladder and the kill order

The focus ends with nukes, and the nuke bill is the part of the plan that is global rather than private. A hydrogen bomb costs 5M to the attacker, and a MIRV costs 25M base plus 15M per MIRV already launched anywhere in the game, a game-wide counter that increments on launch even if the strike is later intercepted. The last part is the one the field must price carefully: the leader has been building all game, and the leader’s own nukes — the MIRVs the leader launched to hold their share — are already on the global counter. Every MIRV the leader fired raises the price of the focus’s own MIRVs by 15M, and the same is true for every other player’s launches. The focus’s nuke budget is therefore not just the focus’s own count; it is the game-wide count plus the focus’s planned strikes, and the price of the killing sequence is set by everyone’s earlier choices.

The kill order follows from the price. A single hydrogen bomb at 5M deletes a cluster of the leader’s land but not a SAM ring, so the nuke’s job is to remove the leader’s SAM network and bunkers in the final minute of the focus, after the two (or three) ground fronts have already broken through the outer defense. The MIRV is the heavier option: it launches a carrier that cannot be SAMmed, separates into many warheads that each must be intercepted one by one, and is the only weapon that can delete the leader’s spread-out holdings in one strike. But the MIRV’s price is the ladder, and the focus must budget each planned MIRV at 15M more than the last, and must count the ready silo tubes, because one ready tube cannot fire three MIRVs at once. The practical kill is usually a mix: a hydrogen bomb or two to clear the SAM ring at the strike minute, then the ground focus through the gap, and then a MIRV if the leader’s remaining share is spread too wide to take by ground alone. The sequence is timed so that the most expensive MIRV lands when the leader’s SAM ring is already spent on the ground fronts, not before.

The Overtime bar changes the kill order when it is on. If the lobby runs Overtime, the bar falls two points per minute after minute 30, and the leader’s winning share shrinks every minute, so the focus does not have to delete the leader’s entire SAM network; it only has to hold the leader’s share below the falling bar for long enough that the bar crosses the leader. The kill order in an Overtime lobby is therefore cheaper: less nuke spending on the SAM ring, more ground pressure to keep the leader from rebuilding, and the MIRV held as the final option rather than the planned centerpiece. The focus in an Overtime game is a holding action, not a deletion action, and that is a real difference in the gold the field spends and the reserves it holds. The version boundary section’s note on the Overtime cadence matters here: on a v0.33 build the bar fell faster per unit time, so the holding action was shorter; on v0.34.24 the bar falls two points per minute, which is the rate the holding math below is priced against.

Scenario one: two-front focus on a 42 percent leader at minute 35

You are in a public FFA on a standard map, and at minute 35 the leader is at 42 percent of usable tiles, you are at 18 percent, the player to your west is at 16 percent, and the remaining two players are at 9 and 7 percent. The leader has not allied with anyone, their SAM ring covers two borders, and their visible reserve is about 150 troops. The bar is the fixed 80 percent line, Overtime is off, and the leader’s growth rate is about 2 percent per minute, so the leader reaches the line in about 19 minutes if nothing changes. The question is whether the field should focus now, and the answer is yes, because the leader has not allied and the two strongest challengers are both within striking range of the leader’s land.

The plan is a two-front focus with a held third reserve. You ally with the west player (16 percent) for the 5-minute default, and the alliance’s first committed minute is minute 38, so the three minutes of the alliance are spent moving reserves and positioning, not attacking. Your 60-troop strike and the west player’s 55-troop strike are timed to reach the leader’s two weakest borders at minute 39, the same minute, so the leader’s 150-troop reserve splits and the SAM coverage stretches across both fronts. The leader’s outer bunkers and SAM ring take the first minute of the strike; the traitor window does not apply here because the alliance is not being broken — it is being used — and the lull it buys is exactly the three minutes the reserves need to move. At minute 40, with the ring partly spent, you launch a hydrogen bomb at 5M onto the leader’s SAM cluster, and the ground focus pours through the gap. The leader’s share drops from 42 to about 28 percent over the next three minutes, and the field is left with two players at 22 and 20 percent and the leader at 28, so no single player is on track for the bar alone, and the game continues as a smaller standoff. The focus met its definition: after it landed, no one could cross 80 percent alone inside the remaining minutes, and two attackers were strong enough to keep the leader from recovering.

Read the timing back against the constants. The 5-minute alliance gave exactly three minutes of movement before the launch, which is the minimum the reserves need to cross the leader’s outer bunkers; a shorter host-set alliance would have forced the strike into minute 37 while the reserves were still behind the first bunker line. The hydrogen bomb at minute 40 landed at the global price, not a private one: if the leader or any other player had launched a MIRV earlier in the game, that bomb and the follow-up would have cost more, so the price you pay at the strike minute is the sum of everyone’s earlier launches. And the 150-troop reserve that split across two fronts is the reason two attackers work here: a single 115-troop strike against the same reserve would have been the full-defense single-threat fight, and the leader would have won it.

Scenario two: the Overtime lobby, holding the bar instead of breaking the ring

The same leader, at 45 percent at minute 30, but the lobby has Overtime enabled, so after minute 30 the required win share falls two points per minute: 80 at minute 30, 78 at minute 31, 76 at minute 32, and so on, with no floor. The leader is at 45 and the bar is at 80 at minute 30, so the leader is 35 points above the bar, and the bar falls 2 points per minute toward the leader’s share, which means the bar reaches the leader’s static 45-percent share at about minute 42 if the leader does not grow. If the leader grows at 1 percent per minute, the bar reaches the leader’s moving share at about minute 39. The focus’s job in this lobby is not to delete the leader’s SAM ring; it is to keep the leader’s share from growing, so that the falling bar does the killing.

The plan is a holding action with two light ground fronts and no planned MIRV. You ally with the 17-percent west player, and the two of you run continuous light pressure on the leader’s two weakest borders for the minutes 30 through 39, holding the leader’s growth near zero with a 40-troop and a 35-troop forward, while the leader’s 140-troop reserve is stretched across the two fronts and cannot rebuild the outer bunkers. The leader cannot answer both fronts with the full reserve, so the holding is affordable: the leader’s growth drops from 1 percent per minute to about 0.2, and the bar falls from 80 at minute 30 to 62 at minute 39, at which point the leader’s share of 45.8 is already below the falling bar, and the leader has lost without a single MIRV being launched. The gold the field spent is the two small reserves’ upkeep, not a nuke sequence, and the MIRV is held as the option for the case where the leader commits hard to one front and breaks the hold. The version note matters: on a v0.33 build the bar fell one point every 30 seconds, so the hold only had to last about half as long; on v0.34.24 the two-points-per-minute cadence is what the nine-minute hold above is priced against, and a lobby on an older build should re-time the hold to the actual cadence.

The holding action is cheaper than the deletion action in gold and in risk. The field spent two small reserves’ upkeep over nine minutes rather than a hydrogen bomb and a MIRV, and the leader’s SAM ring was never cleared, which means the leader could not commit to rebuilding it because the hold was still on the front. That asymmetry is the whole point of the Overtime lobby: the falling bar does the deletion, and the field only has to buy enough time for the bar to pass the leader’s share. The risk is that the leader reads the hold and commits their full reserve to one front, breaking the hold and forcing the field into the deletion action on worse terms; the held MIRV is the insurance against exactly that move, and it is the one expense the Overtime focus still has to price.

Failure modes, counter-moves, and how the leader fights back

The first failure is the single-attacker focus, and it fails by construction: the leader’s full defense answers one threat, the attacker loses the reserve, and the leader gains the attacker’s destroyed buildings, so the snowball widens by the failed attack. The counter is the two-front timing, and the failure of the counter is the timing gap: two attacks that land minutes apart are two separate fights, and the leader wins both. The fix is the alliance’s shared launch minute, and the failure of that is the alliance not forming in time, because by the minute the field agrees to focus, the leader has already allied with the strongest challenger and the focus now faces a two-player defense. The second failure is the traitor-window exposure: the focus breaks the alliance to commit, and the 30-second window opens exactly when the focus’s troops are most exposed on the leader’s border, and the ex-ally’s cheaper, faster retaliation hits the focus’s home front and drops the focus’s share below the level needed to keep the leader from recovering. The counter is the reserve-hold test: the focus only breaks when its own reserve can hold a 30-second cheaper, faster attack, and if it cannot, the alliance is renewed or allowed to expire and the focus is re-timed.

The leader’s counter-moves are the ones the focus must plan against. The leader’s best move is to ally with the strongest challenger before the field does, converting the field’s would-be second attacker into a second defender, which doubles the defense the focus must split and usually makes the focus unaffordable. The leader’s second move is to hold their own MIRV as the answer to the focus’s nuke: when the field launches the hydrogen bomb or the MIRV, the leader launches theirs at the field’s largest front, and the global price ladder means the leader’s MIRV is now more expensive than it was, but it is still a spread-deleting strike on the field’s troops. The focus’s answer to the leader’s MIRV is the third attacker held in reserve: the leader’s MIRV deletes one front, and the third front, which the leader did not have to split against, is the one that finishes the kill. The third move is the leader’s Overtime patience: in an Overtime lobby, the leader can choose to hold their share and let the bar fall to them, and the field’s holding action is the answer, because the field can hold the leader’s share flat while the bar falls, which is exactly scenario two. The focus’s failure modes are therefore timing failures, reserve failures, and alliance failures, and the version-boundary constants are the ones that price each of them: the 30-second window, the 0.5 and 0.8 debuffs, the 5-minute default alliance, and the 15M-per-launch MIRV ladder.

Mode and map adjustments, and when to move on from the focus

The mode changes who the ex-ally is and how fast a reserve can swing, and the map changes the number of borders the leader has to defend. In Humans versus Nations, the “field” is mostly AI, and the alliance is with a Nation, so the Nation’s reserve swings on its own schedule, and the focus’s timing is the human’s timing plus the Nation’s AI queue, which is slower and less predictable than a human ally’s. The map’s usable-tile count changes the bar’s meaning: on a map with fewer usable tiles, the 80 percent line is closer in absolute tiles, so the leader’s share climbs faster in tiles per minute, and the focus has less time before the leader crosses the line; on a map with more usable tiles, the line is farther, and the field has more minutes to plan the two-front strike. The leader’s border count is the map’s direct input to the attacker-count decision: a leader on an open sea map has two or three borders to defend, so two attackers split the defense; a leader on a landlocked cluster with five borders has to split across more fronts, and the focus needs three attackers to stretch that defense. The version note on Overtime applies per lobby, not per map, so the same map can run the fixed-bar standoff on one server and the falling-bar holding action on another, and the focus’s plan must be chosen to match the lobby’s setting, not the map’s.

The decision to move on is the last one, and it is the one players miss most often. If the focus has landed and the leader is at 20 percent with two attackers at 22 and 20, the game is not over; it is a smaller standoff, and the focus’s gold is spent and the reserves are thin, so the next move is the FFA endgame commit decision: with two or three players left, whether to commit the last reserve, reposition behind a mutual-nuke standoff, or hold liquid and let the bar settle. If the focus has not landed and the leader is still climbing, the move is the alliance break timing decision, because the alliance the focus used is now the alliance someone has to break or renew, and that is a 30-second gamble priced by the same window and debuffs this guide used. If the leader’s share is under 25 percent and the bar is 80 and Overtime is off, the focus is not yet urgent, and the field should keep building and wait for the next window, which is the trapped middle position: the field is not yet strong enough to focus, and the right move is to grow into the window, not to force the focus early. The nuke prices and the MIRV ladder for any of those follow-ups are in the MIRV guide, and the current price ladder and the labeled pressure estimate are in the nuke calculator.

The focus decision, priced, in one table

The table below prices the focus’s main branches against the v0.34.24 constants. The reading is: the alliance forms before the leader allies or crosses the bar; the commit needs two simultaneous fronts for a standard leader and three for a five-border leader; the traitor window is only paid when the reserve can hold it; and the nuke settlement is the global MIRV ladder, not a private budget.

Decision point	v0.34.24 constant	The focus’s move
Win bar	80 percent of usable tiles, fixed unless Overtime is on	Focus before the leader’s growth reaches the line; if Overtime is on, hold the bar instead
Overtime (when enabled)	Off by default; 2 points per minute after minute 30, no floor	Overtime lobby: the focus is a holding action, not a deletion action
Alliance duration	5-minute default; host 1–15 minutes; 0 disables	Use the 5-minute default to plan and launch a two-front strike
Trait window	30 seconds; 0.5 defense and 0.8 speed debuffs on the breaker	Break only when the reserve can hold the 30-second cheaper, faster retaliation
Relation drops	-100 to the ex-ally, -40 to each nearby neighbor	Price the focus to win with a slightly hostile neighborhood
MIRV price	25M + 15M per game-wide launch, global counter	Budget each planned MIRV 15M above the last; count the leader’s launches
Hydrogen bomb	5M per strike	Clear the SAM ring at the strike minute, before the ground focus pours through
Attacker count	Two splits a standard leader’s reserve; three for a five-border leader	Time both (or three) attacks to the same minute via the alliance

The one-line version of the whole guide: the crown is only taken by a field that agrees on the launch minute before the leader agrees on the defender, holds a reserve that can survive the 30-second window, and settles the kill with the global MIRV ladder priced against everyone’s earlier launches. The snowball is the default math of a fixed 80 percent line plus compound growth, and the focus is the only coordinated move that breaks it; everything else on the board is waiting for that move to happen, and the player who organizes it is the one who wins the late FFA.

Each row in the table is a decision the focus makes at a specific minute, and the table is meant to be read against the live board rather than memorized. The win-bar row is the trigger row: if the leader’s growth rate times the remaining minutes does not reach the line, the focus is not urgent and the field keeps building; if it does, the alliance row is the next question, and the alliance row is answered by whether the board needs a 5-minute coordinated attack or a 15-minute side. The trait-window row is the risk row: it is the only row where the focus can lose on its own move, and the reserve-hold test is the check that decides whether the focus pays that row at all. The MIRV row is the settlement row: it is the global price, so the focus’s budget at the strike minute is the sum of the game’s earlier launches, and counting the leader’s launches is how the focus prices the final strike before it fires.