Real-Time or Turn-Based: Frontlines vs CONQUEST

Pick Frontlines if you want a match that keeps moving while you think. Pick CONQUEST if you want to stop, look at the board and decide.

Frontlines is real-time: the clock runs, the AI nations act every one to two seconds and a match ends at 70% of the map or at 45 minutes. CONQUEST is turn-based and RISK-style: nothing happens until the player in front of you ends a turn, and a game on the World map took a median of 27 rounds against three bots. The rest of this page is the working, so you can check which one fits your evening.

Frontlines never waits for you

A Frontlines match runs on a simulation of 10 ticks per second. You found a nation, split your population between troops and workers, and spend gold while the map changes under you. There is no turn. The Frontlines FAQ describes the loop: expand, build, attack, repeat, until someone holds 70% of the land.

The AI does not wait either. A nation bot runs a decision pass every think ticks plus a random extra of up to the same length. We converted the numbers in config.js to seconds with scripts/research/conquest-game-length.mjs.

Difficulty	Gap between decisions	Growth and gold bonus for the bots
Easy	2.6 to 5.2 s	none
Normal	1.8 to 3.6 s	+8%
Hard	1.2 to 2.4 s	+30%

Settlers think 1.5 times slower than nations and pirates 1.2 times slower, so the table is the fastest opponent you will meet. The bonus is added to the same multiplier that railways and airports feed, and the line in game.js that applies it is commented "AI handicap: bots grow faster".

The match has a hard ceiling too. A Normal world gives you 45 game-minutes, a Large world 67.5 and a Huge one 90. When the clock runs out, the nation with the most land wins. Multiplayer offers Normal and Large only.

What Frontlines asks of you is attention to a few numbers at once: the troops and workers slider, the attack ratio and your gold. How those turn into wins is in what to build first in Frontlines and how many troops it takes to conquer a nation.

CONQUEST waits for you, up to the timer

CONQUEST is the board game's rhythm. Your turn has three steps: deploy the armies you earn, attack as often as you like, then fortify once. Hasbro's own page for RISK lists the board game for 2 to 5 players, and a long-running RISK FAQ describes the same reinforce, attack, redeploy sequence. CONQUEST is not affiliated with Hasbro. It uses that structure and seats up to 6.

Nobody moves until you do, but the table does not wait forever. The host picks a turn timer of 30, 60, 90 or 120 seconds, and 60 is the default in the server code. If it runs out, your turn is finished for you. Miss two in a row and a bot plays your seat until you come back. If you quit a running game, a god-mode bot inherits your armies.

You also choose how much luck you want. Wild Dice is pure dice. Tactical Dice gives the bigger army better odds and leaves upsets possible. The exact chances for both are in RISK dice odds, every attack calculated, and the card economy that decides long games is in when to trade in RISK cards.

A CONQUEST game takes 8 to 35 rounds

"How long will this take" is the question that decides most evenings, and a turn-based game has no clock to quote. So we ran the real engine and the real bot brains from the CONQUEST code: 40 bot-only games for each setting, Hard bots, Wild Dice, auto-dealt territories. A round is one turn for every living player. The numbers below are the median, with the 10th and 90th percentile in brackets.

World map	Median rounds	10th to 90th percentile
2 players	12	8 to 28
3 players	26	11 to 70
4 players	27	12 to 74
5 players	31	14 to 54
6 players	35	17 to 100

The map matters as much as the head count. With 4 players:

Map	Median rounds	10th to 90th percentile
British Isles	8	4 to 14
Japan	10	6 to 20
Europe	15	9 to 36
Africa	17	9 to 40
World	27	12 to 74
USA	28	16 to 55

Capitals mode ends faster, because holding every capital wins at once: a median of 9 rounds on the World map with 4 players. If the game is short on time, that is the setting to pick.

To turn rounds into minutes, multiply by the turn timer. With the default 60 seconds, 27 rounds is a ceiling of 27 minutes of your own thinking. Watching the bots adds time on top: the server pauses 620 milliseconds, plus up to 220 more, between bot actions.

Which one fits which evening

You want	Pick	Why
A game that ends in a predictable time	Frontlines	45 minutes is the cap on a Normal world
To stop and think for a minute	CONQUEST	The game waits, up to a timer you set
An economy: cities, factories, ports, ships	Frontlines	Gold and population are the whole game
Dice and odds you can calculate	CONQUEST	Every attack has a known probability
2 to 6 friends on one map	CONQUEST	Seats are set by the host, bots fill the rest
A big crowd of nations	Frontlines	Solo with up to 99 AI nations, multiplayer rooms of 12 to 60 players
A short solo game	CONQUEST on a small map	British Isles took a median of 8 rounds
No pause button, a real clock	Frontlines multiplayer	The room runs at 1x for everyone

Two honest caveats. Both games are free in the browser and need no account, but our lobbies are quieter than those of the older real-time games, so a Frontlines room fills with bots. If you want the same kind of match with the biggest crowd, OpenFront is open source, describes itself as an online real-time strategy game, and is worth a look. The Frontlines alternatives page and the CONQUEST one lay out where the other games beat us.

The second caveat is the one for groups. CONQUEST follows the board game's turn, so a friend who has played RISK already knows it. Frontlines asks them to read a map that is moving. How each game handles a room, a link and a team is covered in the room setup guide for both games.

If you cannot decide, try the one with the shorter setup

Both are one click from the page. Frontlines starts a solo match against AI nations without a lobby. CONQUEST has a quick play button that fills the table with bots, and its rules page fits on one screen. A single game of each tells you more than any comparison, including this one.

The numbers here come from config.js and game.js in the Frontlines code and from engine.js, bots.js and server/index.js in the CONQUEST code. The simulation can be rerun with scripts/research/conquest-game-length.mjs in the blog repository, and because the bots use random choices, a rerun will move individual figures by a round or two.