OpenFront Nuclear Salvo Sizing: When to Commit x1, x2, x5, or xMax

Direct answer: commit the smallest salvo that still beats the window

Result first. When you open the nuke build button you are not choosing how to build; you are choosing how many nukes to commit in one action. The submenu shows x1, x2, x5, and xMax, and the right pick is almost never the biggest one. It is the smallest size that still lands at least one warhead after the defender’s SAM launchers have spent their current reload window, and that you can afford without emptying your gold on the follow-up push that actually decides the match. In a typical endgame you will fire x2 more often than any other size, because a single ready SAM launcher eats exactly one nuke and your goal is to spend the minimum that gets a second nuke through. You escalate to x5 only when the ring is deep enough that four or more launchers can spend the window you are giving them, and you reserve xMax for the rare endgame where the defender has so many ready tubes of their own that you must delete the launchers and the land in the same action. The version boundary that matters here is the cap on xMax: your maximum is the smaller of what your gold can buy and the number of ready missile tubes across your completed silos. If you have finished only one level-one silo and it is still reloading, xMax is x1 and the submenu does not even appear, so the click just fires one nuke and the menu never renders. So before you ever pick a button, answer two questions: how many ready SAM slots does the defender actually have in this window, and how many ready tubes do I have and how much gold do I want to leave for the push. Once you have both numbers, the menu choice is arithmetic, not instinct, and the arithmetic is cheap enough to do in your head every single time. The reason the smallest-salvo rule wins so often is that a salvo is a commitment, not a probe: every nuke you throw is gone for the rest of the match, whether it lands or not, so the extra warheads you fire beyond the minimum are almost always a donation to the defender’s rebuild rather than a gain for your own. Treat the minimum that beats the window as your default and only climb the sizes when the defender’s ready slots actually climb with it, and you will spend your gold on the push that ends the game instead of on the exchange that delays it. This is the single most useful reframe for the whole menu: you are not maximising how many nukes you fire, you are minimising how many you need, and the button you press is whatever number that minimum happens to be on your turn.

What x1, x2, x5, and xMax actually do

The four buttons are not four different weapons; they are four quantities of the same armed nuke applied to one action. x1 commits a single warhead. x2 commits two. x5 commits five. xMax commits as many as you can execute right now. The layout is fixed on purpose so you can reach the right size by muscle memory without reading the labels: going clockwise from the top of the button the slots are x1 at the top, x2 on the right, x5 at the bottom, and xMax on the left. Each slot shows its total cost in gold before you commit, so a slot that you cannot currently afford is drawn dimmed and does nothing when you click it. The fixed steps are two and five; that is the whole set of standard salvo sizes the game offers, and everything between those steps and the ceiling above them is covered by xMax, which is the one size that changes from match to match. That is the important asymmetry to understand and the reason the menu can feel unpredictable if you treat it like a fixed menu. x1, x2, and x5 are constants you can plan around in advance because you know exactly what they spend on any given turn. xMax is a live value that reflects your current state: the more completed silos you have with tubes that have finished reloading, and the more gold you are sitting on, the larger xMax becomes. When xMax is larger than x5 it gives you a real fifth option, and when your tubes or your gold are low it collapses back down toward x1, which is why the same button that was your biggest option on one turn can be your smallest on the next. The practical consequence is that xMax is the honest answer to the question of what the most you can do right now, and you should never form a habit of defaulting to it the way you might with a single-tube silo, because the number it is advertising is only as real as your current ready count. The three fixed slots earn their place by being the sizes you can commit on reflex: x1 is the probe you throw when you are not sure the window is open, x2 is the exchange you throw against a single launcher, and x5 is the burst you throw when you have already decided the ring is small and you want to win it in one go. xMax is the only slot you should treat as a question rather than a command, because by the time you reach for it the situation has usually changed enough that the right move is a smaller, more deliberate commit followed by a re-measure, and the moment you learn to ask xMax instead of pressing it you stop the single most expensive reflex in the nuke menu.

The gold and tube math behind every button

Every salvo button is a multiplication you can do before you click, and doing it is the whole skill of the decision. The per-nuke gold costs in the current build are 750,000 for an Atom Bomb, 5,000,000 for a Hydrogen Bomb, and a MIRV that starts at 25,000,000 and climbs by 15,000,000 for every MIRV that has been launched in the game so far. The salvo sizes multiply those costs linearly: an x2 Atom salvo is 1,500,000, an x5 Atom salvo is 3,750,000, and an xMax of, say, six Atoms is 4,500,000. There is no discount for firing together and no surcharge, which makes the gold side of the decision clean: the cost is simply the single-nuke price times the number you are committing, and the tooltip on each slot shows you that exact figure before you commit. The other side of the cap is tubes. Each completed Missile Silo holds a number of tubes equal to its level, so a level-one silo carries one ready nuke at a time and a level-three silo carries three. After a tube fires it reloads over roughly 90 ticks, about nine seconds, before it is ready again, and your ready count is the sum of the non-reloading tubes across every completed silo, which is the ceiling the game puts on xMax alongside your gold. The table below is the reference you should hold in your head so you do not have to count on the spot, and it shows why the tube column, not the gold column, is the one that usually stops you.

Salvo	Atoms committed	Gold (Atoms)	Tubes needed
x1	1	750,000	1
x2	2	1,500,000	2
x5	5	3,750,000	5
xMax (example: 6)	6	4,500,000	6

Read that table the wrong way and you will overcommit. A common error is to look at xMax and see a big number, click it, and spend four and a half million on Atoms when the defender’s whole window was one launcher that a single x2 would have beaten at fifteen hundred thousand. You cannot fire x5 from two level-one silos no matter how much gold you have, because you only have two ready tubes, so the salvo size is only as real as the minimum of your gold and your tubes, and the menu encodes exactly that minimum before you ever pay for it.

Sizing the salvo against the SAM window

The defender’s SAM launchers are what turn the question of how many nukes you have into the question of how many nukes you need. A SAM Launcher can shoot down one incoming nuke and then reloads for about 90 ticks, the same nine seconds a fired missile tube takes to recover, and that symmetry is the whole game of the window. If the defender has one ready launcher aimed at your landing zone, it will eat one of your nukes and be spent before the rest of your salvo arrives, so the minimum that lands is two: one decoy that is intercepted and one that gets through. If the defender has two ready launchers, the minimum that lands is three, and so on up the line. You do not need to match their total launcher count, which is a much bigger number than the one that matters here; you need to exceed the number of launchers that can actually spend this window, which is their ready slots right now, not their completed launcher total, because a launcher that fired ten seconds ago is reloading and is useless for this specific volley. That distinction is what sizing is all about. You are not counting their buildings, you are counting their live intercept capacity in the specific seconds your warheads are inbound, and those two counts differ by exactly the number of launchers that are mid-reload. A good habit is to treat the defender’s ring as a pool: multiply the launchers you can see by their level, because a higher-level launcher has more slots, and then subtract the ones you can see are reloading, and that number is the wall your salvo has to clear by one. The moment your committed size is one more than that number, at least one warhead is guaranteed to land, and the decision shifts from whether it will land to whether this is the cheapest way to make it land and what you are going to do with the hit. There is a further subtlety in the window that separates a good salvo from a wasted one: the reload is a race, not a fixed number of shots. Because your tube and the defender’s launcher both take about nine seconds to recover, the first volley is the only one where the defender’s full ready count is live; by your second volley some of their launchers will still be reloading while yours are not, which means the second commit should be sized against a smaller window than the first. That is why a player who measures the window once and then fires the same size twice in a row is usually overpaying on the second shot. The disciplined version measures the ready slots, fires the minimum that beats them, watches which launchers spent their shots and are now reloading, and then sizes the follow-up against the reduced count rather than the original one. If the window has closed because the defender had no spares, the follow-up should be x1 or a pause, not a repeat x5, and that single habit of re-measuring before every second commit is worth more over a full endgame than any single oversized salvo.

Scenario 1: breaking a single-SAM wall

Suppose you have finished one level-one Missile Silo and have just enough gold for a few Atoms, and your target city is protected by exactly one level-one SAM Launcher sitting inside its own coverage. The window math is simple. That launcher has one ready slot, so it will intercept exactly one of your nukes and then reload. Your ready tube count is one, which means xMax is x1 and the submenu is not even available, so you cannot fire a decoy and a killer from the same silo in the same volley because you only have one tube. So a single level-one silo against a single level-one launcher is a wash: your one nuke gets eaten and you are back at one reloading tube against one reloading launcher, with no progress made on either side. This is the exact moment to reach for a second silo or to upgrade the one you have, because both give you a second ready tube and turn your next volley into a real x2 that actually breaks the exchange. Once you have two ready tubes and about 1.5 million in gold, the play is clear: fire x2 into the landing zone. The launcher eats the first, the second lands, and the nine-second reloads now run in parallel for both sides, which means the defender cannot immediately answer your next x2 any more than you can answer theirs. The decision that changes your play here is that the single silo was not underpowered, it was under-tubed: the gold was never the limit, the tube count was. If you instead had three or four ready tubes and a flat 4 million, you would skip the x2 exchange entirely and fire x5, because against a single launcher four of your five land almost for free and the blast is far more useful than a single Atom at that cost. The same window, two different answers, decided entirely by your ready tubes and not by your gold. The lesson that carries over to every single-SAM wall you will face is that the wall is a property of the defender’s ready slots, and your only honest way to find out what it is to watch which launchers fire and which are still reloading, because the launcher that is reloading is the one your second nuke walks right past. A player who cannot read the reload bar is a player who will keep firing x2 into a wall that has already closed, paying fifteen hundred thousand every time for a decoy that a free x1 would have done just as well, and that single misread is the most common way the smallest-salvo rule fails in practice: not because the rule is wrong, but because the window was re-measured at the start of the turn instead of the instant before the commit, and in the gap between those two moments the defender’s launcher finished reloading and the exchange you were winning is suddenly the exchange you are losing.

Scenario 2: a two-launcher ring and the hydrogen question

Now make the ring deeper. Your target is defended by two SAM Launchers, one level one and one level two, clustered over the same pocket of land, and you have four completed silos with a comfortable ready count and the gold to spare. The two-launcher window means the defender can spend at most three intercept slots in this volley if the level-two launcher has two slots and the level-one has one, so a four-nuke salvo is the first size that is guaranteed to land at least one. Because four is not one of the fixed steps, you reach it only through xMax when your ready tubes allow exactly four, and the nearest fixed button that clears the ring is x5, which lands one more than the window needs and is the safe version if you want the landing zone deleted rather than merely hit. Here is where the weapon choice and the salvo size become one decision instead of two separate ones you make in sequence. An Atom at 750,000 with a small blast is a probe; if you fire x5 Atoms you are spending 3.75 million and landing maybe three small blasts that may not clear the ring or the buildings behind it. A single Hydrogen at 5,000,000 with a large blast is one action, no salvo needed, that can take the pocket and the launchers together, but it costs more than the whole Atom salvo and leaves you with no follow-up if it is intercepted. The decision framework does not pick the weapon for you; it sizes the salvo once you have chosen it. If you commit to Atoms, you size by the window: at least four, comfortably five. If you commit to a Hydrogen, the salvo question collapses to x1 and the real question becomes whether a single large hit is worth five million when you could be probing with Atoms you can afford to lose. The counterplay the defender has in this exact position is to keep the two launchers on opposite sides of the pocket so your warheads do not arrive in one tight window that a single salvo can clear, forcing you to spend more tubes than one x5 provides. That is why the hydrogen question in a two-launcher ring is almost always the wrong question to ask while the ring is still live: the moment the defender is spacing launchers, a single large blast becomes easier to avoid than a salvo of small ones, because you have to get one very big hit through a split window, whereas a salvo lets each small warhead take a different launcher and the ones that land do real work even if the others are eaten. The player who reaches for the hydrogen out of respect for the ring is the player who spends five million to be intercepted, while the player who fires a measured x5 at the denser side of the pocket spends three point seven five and still deletes the launchers that were covering half of it.

When the salvo backfires: failure and counterplay

The x1/x2/x5/xMax menu makes three specific mistakes easy, and each one costs real gold rather than just time, which is why the failure modes deserve their own section. The first is the ghost click. After you fire a salvo the nuke can stay armed on the map, and a stray click then launches a second, unintended volley at a tile you did not mean to hit, which is exactly how a single over-confident player deletes their own landing zone or a former ally in the middle of the endgame. The fix is discipline: cancel the armed weapon after every deliberate salvo before you move on to the next action, so the menu and the armed state do not stack into an accidental second commit. The second is the gold lock. xMax is the size that drains the most gold in one action, and firing it in the middle of the game is often the worst possible time, because the money you just spent is money you cannot spend on the push, on the rebuild after a hit lands on you, or on the second front that just opened while you were staring at the window. The correct use of xMax is the endgame where the defender has no economy left to answer with and the goal is deletion rather than exchange; using it mid-game to win a single window is usually a loss of income that a cheaper x2 would have won the same window for. The third is the undercounted ring. The defender is not static: while you are reading the window they are building launchers and leveling them, so the x5 you committed against was the ring from two seconds ago, not the ring your warheads are about to hit. Re-measure the ready slots the instant before you commit, not at the start of your planning turn, and treat any change as a reason to either add a tube or abandon the push. The counterplay that makes a bad salvo survivable is the same for the defender and the attacker: spacing. A defender who spreads launchers across the pocket forces the attacker to throw more nukes than a single salvo size offers, and an attacker who spaces their silos and their landing zone makes it harder for the defender to cover both sides with one ring. The menu does not solve the geometry; it just prices the geometry, and the price only makes sense if you measured the geometry honestly.

Mode and map adjustments

The same x1/x2/x5/xMax logic changes its optimal answer depending on the mode and the map you are on, so the rule of the smallest salvo that beats the window needs the same three adjustments in every one of them. In a free-for-all you are almost always facing more than one front at once, which means the temptation to dump xMax on the most threatening player is the single most common way to lose, because the second and third players are reading your gold the same way you are reading theirs and will punish the hole you just left. The FFA answer is to keep every salvo at the minimum that wins its window, hold the excess gold in reserve, and reserve a big salvo for the one moment when two rivals are fighting over the same pocket and your x5 deletes both of them instead of just one. In a two-versus-two or a ranked match the timing is coordinated, so the window is not just the defender’s reload, it is the moment your team has agreed to commit, and the salvo size becomes a team number rather than a personal one; the player who fires it should be the one with the most ready tubes so the whole commitment comes from one economy instead of a fragmented one. Map size matters because it sets how quickly the window becomes real: on a compact map the warheads cross in a few seconds and the defender’s launchers come online fast, so you are committing into a fuller ring more often and the cheapest winning salvo is usually smaller than it looks. On a large map the flight is long enough that the defender can still be mid-build when your salvo leaves, which favors a slightly bigger salvo to cover the launchers they add in the air. Water maps add a geometry wrinkle: a nuke that travels over water can be fired from a silo that the defender cannot reach with their own ring, but the blast only reaches so far from the shoreline, so the salvo size you commit is also a function of how much of the target you can actually touch from across the water. Whatever the mode and the map, the rule that survives all of them is the same: measure the ready slots and the ready tubes, pick the smallest size that beats both, and leave the gold you did not spend for the push that actually ends the game.

A quick decision table for the build menu

When the submenu is open, run this short check before you commit, because the menu is showing you the price but not the reason, and the reason is the only thing that changes turn to turn. Count the defender’s ready SAM slots in the window and call that the wall. Count your own ready tubes and call that the ceiling, and know that xMax is the smaller of your gold and that ceiling, which is why the number on the left slot is the number to trust when you are in doubt about how much you actually have to work with right now. Then pick by the relationship between the two. If the wall is zero, fire x1 and keep your tubes for the next window. If the wall is one, fire x2 and spend the minimum that gets a nuke through. If the wall is two or three, fire x5, because that is the first fixed size that clears a small ring and the extra nukes are cheap relative to the blast you buy with them. If the wall is four or more, fire xMax, but only in an endgame where the defender has no economy to answer and the goal is deletion, otherwise a x5 plus a re-measured follow-up is usually the better use of your gold. The table below compresses the rule so you can hold it while your eyes are on the map rather than on the arithmetic.

Defender ready slots	Your ready tubes	Pick
0	any	x1, keep tubes
1	at least 2	x2
2 to 3	at least 5	x5
4 or more	enough and endgame	xMax

The one line that is worth memorizing is that you are never choosing the biggest nuke you can fire, you are choosing the smallest nuke that still lands after the window, and the moment the smallest one stops landing you add exactly the tubes you were missing and re-measure rather than reaching for the next size up. The deep reading on the weapon side of this decision is at which nuke to commit, and the full geometry of a salvo against a launcher ring is at nukes against a SAM wall. If you want the exact costs and ranges as you read the table, the nuclear weapons mechanics page is the place to keep open. One habit that turns this from theory into reflex is to read the greyed-out cells first: a greyed x5 or xMax is a signal that your tubes or your gold are the binding limit, so the correct move is usually to finish or upgrade one more tube before you touch the button, and the correct move is never to spend gold you have already decided you need for the closing push just to light a menu slot that you cannot actually fire.