Is the Frontlines Capital Worth 15,000 Gold?

Yes. Once you hold about four cities and a factory or two, the capital is the best single purchase in Frontlines. It costs 15,000 gold, adds 8,000 to your population cap and raises your growth and gold by 25%. In our model it earns its price back in under five minutes.

The catch is the price tag, and the 30 seconds after you lose it. Both are below, with the numbers from the game code.

What the capital gives you

Three effects, all from config.js and game.js:

• Population cap +8,000. A city gives 3,500, so the capital is worth 2.29 cities of room for troops and workers.
• Multiplier +0.25. Population growth and gold income are both multiplied by 1 + boost, and the capital contributes 0.25 of it. That is a quarter more gold from every worker and every factory you already have.
• One at a time, flat price. The game refuses a second capital while you hold one, and the price skips the escalation that every other building has. A first capital and one rebuilt after a loss cost the same 15,000.

The in-game tooltip says "Big boost to population & gold. If captured/destroyed, your defense drops 20% for 30s." The FAQ says the same thing shorter. Neither gives you a payback time, so we computed one.

It pays back in under five minutes

We ran the game's economy formulas for a nation at peace: population full at its old cap, the default 60 / 40 troops and workers slider, and the capital bought at second zero. The script is scripts/research/frontlines-capital.mjs in the blog repository and imports the numbers from the game code, so a rebalance changes the output. The measure is the payback period: the time until the extra gold equals the price. That measure ignores what happens afterwards, so the table also shows the net position at 10 and 20 minutes.

Nation before buying	Income before	Time to save 15,000 from zero	Capital pays back after	Net gain at 10 min	Net gain at 20 min
300 tiles, 2 cities, 1 factory	47.5 gold/s	5:16	4:52	+17,227	+50,752
600 tiles, 4 cities, 2 factories	90.6 gold/s	2:46	4:02	+23,911	+63,901
1,200 tiles, 6 cities, 4 factories	146.0 gold/s	1:43	3:19	+32,349	+80,649
1,200 tiles, 8 cities, 6 factories	194.8 gold/s	1:17	2:52	+39,732	+95,352

"Net gain" is the extra gold the capital has produced, minus its 15,000 price. A bigger economy gets more from it because the multiplier applies to everything. The bigger the nation, the faster the capital pays back and the sooner you can afford it.

One honest limit: this is a peace model. In a real match fighting drains your population, and your slider moves. Treat the table as the shape of the answer, not a stopwatch.

After your third city, the capital beats another city

Cities escalate: 2,500, 3,750, 5,000, 6,250, 8,750 and 11,250 for the first six. The capital does not. So the question "capital or cities" depends on how many cities you already own.

Cities owned	What 15,000 buys in cities	Pop cap added	Capital for the same 15,000
0	3 cities (2,500 + 3,750 + 5,000)	10,500	8,000 plus +25%
2	2 cities (5,000 + 6,250)	7,000	8,000 plus +25%
4	1 city (8,750)	3,500	8,000 plus +25%
6	1 city (13,750)	3,500	8,000 plus +25%
8	nothing (the next city is above 15,000)	0	8,000 plus +25%

At zero or one city, cities win on raw cap. At four, the capital buys 2.3 times the room and a multiplier on top. On cost per point of population cap it lands near your fourth city (1.88 gold against 1.79) and far below the sixth (3.21).

We also ran the two as rivals for 20 minutes. At 600 tiles and 4 cities, the one city that 15,000 buys paid its 8,750 back after 9 minutes 50 seconds. The capital paid 15,000 back after 4 minutes 2 seconds. At 6 cities the single city took 15 minutes 12 seconds. The build-order post has the same comparison for the first city against the first factory.

A factory gives a flat 9 gold per second. The third one costs 6,000. Per 1,000 gold spent that is 1.50 gold per second, against about 4.4 for the capital over minutes 10 to 20 in the 600-tile case.

Do not stack the whole multiplier on rails and airports

The multiplier is capped at 1.6. The capital takes 0.25 of the 0.6 of room, so with one you have 0.35 left for railways (0.04 each) and airports (0.07 each). The capital counts as a city for a railway or airport next to it, so building it near your factories saves you a second cluster. Our railway or airport post shows when each booster repays, and the capital is the one that always does.

Losing it costs 30 seconds and one big swing

If an enemy takes the capital tile, or a missile wipes it, three things happen at once:

1. For 30 seconds every tile of yours costs attackers 20% less to take.
2. You lose the 8,000 cap and the 25% multiplier.
3. If an enemy captured it, the building becomes a city under the new owner, which is +3,500 cap for them. A missile just deletes it.

After a capture the cap gap between you and the player who took it is 11,500. You can rebuild for 15,000, and so can the AI, which buys one once its population is above 70% of the cap, it holds at least 18,000 gold and more than 4% of the map. The attack cost post shows what a 20% discount means in troops, and the SAM post covers the one way a capital far from any border can still disappear.

So place it deep in your land, on a tile no army can reach without crossing several others, not on the coast facing the nation that is already your problem. A defense post near it is cheap insurance next to 15,000 gold.

What other games do with a capital

We make Frontlines and CONQUEST. For contrast, the engine configuration of OpenFront has no capital entry in its unit cost table. It prices a city at Math.min(1_000_000, pow2(numUnits) * 125_000), an escalating curve with a ceiling. We are not affiliated with OpenFront. Our CONQUEST capitals post covers a different idea with the same word: there, a capital is a win condition, not an economy building.

You can try the order above in a free Frontlines match, against the AI, in the browser.