Browser Strategy Games With Real-World Maps, Compared

Frontlines and CONQUEST between them ship 20 distinct real-world maps: 15 in each game, with 10 regions that appear in both. Frontlines draws the real coastline and generates the terrain on top of it. CONQUEST keeps the real coastline and carves the land into 18 to 42 territories.

That is the part that decides which map you want. Whether it is "real" depends on what you need from it: a shape you recognize, or borders you can argue about.

Frontlines draws the real coast and invents the terrain

The Frontlines map data is a land and water mask. The file header says it is generated from Natural Earth data, which is public domain. Nothing in the mask marks a country border, so the game has no real-world countries to fight over: your nation spreads over land tiles and stops at water or at another nation.

Everything else on the land is made up. The generator in map.js lays synthetic elevation and moisture over the mask, turns the high spots into highlands, the dry spots into desert and runs rivers downhill from the highlands to the sea. Those features change with the match seed. The coastline never does.

Real seas still matter. A body of water counts as navigable if it touches the map edge or is larger than 300 tiles, so a real strait is a real ship route and a small lake is not.

Every real map is cut to roughly the same 90,000-tile grid, wherever it is in the world. That has a side effect nobody sees in the map picker: how much land you get depends on how much sea the region contains. We ran the map generator on all 15 with a fixed seed.

Map	Multiplayer	Grid	Land tiles	Land share
Strait of Hormuz	solo only	368 x 245	71,980	79.8%
Eurasia	yes	395 x 228	60,006	66.6%
Vietnam & Indochina	solo only	277 x 325	52,999	58.9%
Europe	yes	291 x 310	52,218	57.9%
Asia	yes	375 x 240	52,206	58.0%
Africa	yes	294 x 306	51,116	56.8%
USA	yes	407 x 221	47,779	53.1%
Russia	yes	435 x 207	45,685	50.7%
Germany	solo only	270 x 333	43,764	48.7%
South America	yes	241 x 373	42,105	46.8%
North America	yes	344 x 261	34,013	37.9%
World	yes	469 x 192	26,757	29.7%
Australia & Oceania	solo only	365 x 247	25,106	27.8%
Americas	solo only	303 x 297	23,997	26.7%
Southeast Asia	solo only	349 x 258	21,581	24.0%

Normal size, one fixed seed, rivers excluded from the land count, so a different seed moves each figure by a few tiles. The multiplayer column is the list the game server accepts for rooms. Pangaea and Twin Continents are the two procedural maps on that list.

If you want to know what to do with a map once you have picked it, what to build first in Frontlines covers the opening on any of them.

CONQUEST keeps the coast and carves the land into territories

CONQUEST is turn-based and RISK-style, so a map has to be a graph of territories. The geometry file says how it gets there: each map projects real landmasses (or US state shapes) onto the canvas, then divides the land into territories with a Voronoi diagram around lon and lat seed points. The comment in the code puts it as real coastlines and stylized interior borders, the same trick as a printed board.

You can see it in the Japan screenshot below. Kyushu, Shikoku and Hokkaido are in the right place, and the territories inside them are polygons.

The size of a map is the number of territories, and the bonuses come with the regions. We read all 15 map files:

Map	Territories	Regions	Highest bonus
World Classic	42	6	Asia 7
USA	39	7	Midwest 4
Russia	32	7	Siberia 4
China	31	7	East 4
Asia	30	6	East Asia 5
Africa	28	5	West Africa 4
Europe	27	6	Eastern Europe 4
Middle East	27	6	Persia 4
North America	27	6	The North 3
Japan	22	8	Tohoku 3
Oceania	19	6	Western Australia 3
British Isles	18	5	Scotland 3
Germany	18	5	Norden 3
Nordics	18	5	Norway 3
South America	18	5	Brazilian Coast 4

World Classic is the one built on purpose to look familiar. The note in its map file calls it the traditional 42-territory, 6-continent layout on real Earth. CONQUEST is not affiliated with Hasbro, but if you know the board game, that is the map you know. Which continent to take first on it works through its bonuses.

Ten regions are in both games and ten are in one

If you only care about the place, this is the lookup.

Region	Frontlines	CONQUEST
World	World	World Classic
Europe	Europe	Europe
Asia	Asia	Asia
Africa	Africa	Africa
North America	North America	North America
South America	South America	South America
USA	USA	USA
Russia	Russia	Russia
Germany	Germany	Germany
Oceania	Australia & Oceania	Oceania

Only in Frontlines: Southeast Asia, Americas, Eurasia, Vietnam & Indochina and Strait of Hormuz. Only in CONQUEST: British Isles, China, Japan, Middle East and Nordics. So a Japan or Nordics game is a CONQUEST game, and a Hormuz, Eurasia or Vietnam game is a Frontlines one.

The same region plays very differently in the two games. Frontlines gives you thousands of land tiles to expand across in real time. CONQUEST gives you 18 to 42 territories to fight over in turns. Real-time or turn-based goes through that choice.

Other browser games that use real geography

We make both games above, so this section only reports what each game's own site or repository says, checked for this page. We did not play them for it.

Game	Style	What its own page says
OpenFront	Real-time	README: "various maps based on real-world geography". Its resources/maps folder lists 132 map folders, including world, europe, asia, africa, japan and straitofhormuz next to fantasy ones such as mars and luna. Open source
territorial.io	Real-time	No map page. The game's own client script names World 1, World 2, Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America, Middle East, Scandinavia, Caucasia, Australia and British Isles, next to abstract maps such as Island and Desert
Warzone	Turn-based	Its wiki lists an Earth map by Grundie with 153 territories and 27 bonuses, split by real continents and regions
Rivok	Real-time	"Real-time conquest battles for up to 100 players ... on a real world map." Free in the browser, with a login

Two caveats. OpenFront's folder count includes tournament maps (tourney1 to tourney4) and fantasy ones, and we did not check which are in the public rotation. territorial.io's names come from its client file, not from a published list, so the live selection may differ.

Where those games win is the part we cannot match. OpenFront has a far larger map library than our 20, going by its folder count, and territorial.io and OpenFront have far more people online than our lobbies do. If you want a real-world map with a crowd on it, they are the first place to look. Our Frontlines alternatives page and the CONQUEST one say the same thing in more detail.

How to pick a map for tonight

You want	Open	Map
A real strait with sea routes, solo	Frontlines	Strait of Hormuz or Southeast Asia
The most land to expand across	Frontlines	Eurasia or Europe
Recognizable borders and bonuses	CONQUEST	World Classic
A short, small board	CONQUEST	British Isles, Germany or Nordics, 18 territories each
A real-world map in a friends room	either	Room setup guide
The widest choice of maps	OpenFront	132 folders in its repository

One practical limit: if you plan to play Frontlines with friends, check the multiplayer column in the table above first. Six of the 15 real maps, including Germany and the Strait of Hormuz, are solo only.

The numbers on this page come from src/map.js, src/maps_data.js and server/server.js in the Frontlines code, and from maps/*.js and shared/geometry.js in the CONQUEST code. The script that produced the tables is scripts/research/real-world-maps.mjs in the blog repository.