How Long Is a Frontlines or CONQUEST Match?

A Frontlines match is over in about 12 minutes when one nation reaches 70% of the land, and it is cut off at 45 game minutes on a normal world either way. A 2-player CONQUEST game between Hard bots took 7 to 13 rounds, depending on the map.

Those are the answers. The tables below show how they change with the map, the world size and the number of players, and the last section says what the numbers do not tell you.

We make both games. The figures come from running the real game code with bots, so they describe the rules and the AI, not a stopwatch of human players.

Frontlines ends at 70% of the land or at the clock

Two things end a Frontlines match in free-for-all. A nation that holds 70% of the land wins at once (winShare in the game's config.js), or the clock runs out and the biggest nation wins. The clock is 27,000 ticks, which is 45 game minutes at 10 ticks per second, multiplied by the world size: 1 for Normal, 1.5 for Large, 2 for Huge.

The comment next to the clock rule in the game code says why it exists: no more "island-titan or twin-superpower forever-games". In Outbreak mode the same clock is a win for the survivor.

In single-player there is a third way to end it. The match stops the moment you are eliminated. Lose early and you get a short game. The numbers below leave that out, because the bench lets the AI play on.

Almost six in ten matches are decided by minute 20

We ran 20 matches on each of 8 maps: Normal size, Normal difficulty, 9 AI opponents, free-for-all. A passive player took slot one, so these are AI-versus-AI matches. The script is scripts/research/frontlines-match-length.mjs and it drives the real Game class tick by tick.

Map	Won at 70%	Ran to the clock	Median minute	Fastest	Decided by minute 20
Earth	15	5	13.9	8.6	13 of 20
Europe	13	7	15.1	8.4	13 of 20
Asia	14	6	13.6	8.5	14 of 20
Vietnam	13	7	16.0	8.4	12 of 20
Germany	11	9	16.3	7.9	11 of 20
Africa	11	9	17.0	9.3	11 of 20
Strait of Hormuz	11	9	19.1	9.2	11 of 20
USA	7	13	45.0	8.0	7 of 20

Over all 160 matches, 95 ended at 70% and 65 ran to the clock. The 95 had a median finish of 11.8 minutes, a 10th percentile of 9.2 and a 90th percentile of 16.6. No match ended by "last nation alive" on these 8 maps.

The USA map is the outlier. In 13 of 20 matches no nation reached 70%, and the median largest nation at the whistle held 57.4% of the land. If you want a long game, that is the map the numbers point to. If you want a short one, Asia gave the best odds of a result before minute 20, 14 of 20.

A match not decided by minute 20 usually runs to the clock

This is the useful rule for planning an evening. Of the 95 matches that ended at 70%, 92 did so by minute 20. Only 3 took longer. Put the other way, 68 of the 160 matches were still running at minute 20, and 65 of those went to the clock. So if nobody is near 70% at the 20-minute mark, expect to play to 45.

That also tells you how to read the 45. It is a ceiling, and the typical decided match is far shorter. If a friend says "one quick match", a Normal world on Earth, Europe or Asia is a fair bet. A rough guide to the opening is in what to build first, since a faster economy is what gets one nation to 70% sooner.

World size matters less than the map

We repeated the run for Large and Huge worlds on three maps (20 matches each). The clock stretches to 67.5 and 90 minutes, but the median match does not stretch with it.

Map and size	Clock (min)	Won at 70%	Ran to the clock	Last nation alive	Median minute	Decided by minute 20
Earth, Normal	45	15	5	0	13.9	13 of 20
Earth, Large	67.5	13	6	1	16.3	13 of 20
Earth, Huge	90	18	1	1	15.9	14 of 20
Europe, Normal	45	13	7	0	15.1	13 of 20
Europe, Large	67.5	17	3	0	13.8	17 of 20
Europe, Huge	90	14	6	0	23.3	9 of 20
USA, Normal	45	7	13	0	45.0	7 of 20
USA, Large	67.5	11	9	0	20.0	11 of 20
USA, Huge	90	13	7	0	19.5	12 of 20

Huge Europe is the one that really slows down, at a median of 23.3 minutes. On Earth the median barely moves. A Huge world only lengthens the matches that stall: those can run for an hour and a half.

CONQUEST counts rounds, not minutes

CONQUEST has no clock. A game ends when one player owns the board (or, in Capitals mode, the capitals). So the length is a number of rounds, where a round is one turn for every player still alive. We simulated games between bots on the real engine and bot code, 40 per row, Hard bots, Wild Dice, auto-dealt territories.

Map, 2 players	Territories	Median rounds	10th to 90th percentile
British Isles	18	7	5 to 13
Japan	22	8	5 to 11
Europe	27	9	7 to 19
Africa	28	10	6 to 16
Russia	32	11	8 to 22
USA	39	12	7 to 39
World Classic	42	13	8 to 27

More players stretch the game faster than a bigger map. On the World map with four players, the median was 27 rounds. The full run on that map:

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

The 2-player World row reads 12 here and 13 in the table above because the two runs use different random seeds. Treat it as 12 to 13.

The bot level matters most of all. In four-player World games, four Easy bots needed a median of 306 rounds, Medium bots 117, Hard bots 27 and God Mode bots 31. Easy bots want 2.2 armies per defender before they attack, as the bot breakdown shows, so a table of them mostly shuffles armies. A human at the table breaks that stalemate.

Turning rounds into minutes

Bots do not hesitate, so rounds are the honest unit. The only time figure we can derive is a ceiling. The host sets the turn timer to 30, 60, 90 or 120 seconds, and the server defaults to 60. A turn ends automatically when the timer runs out, so using every second of every turn is the maximum.

For your own turns in a 2-player game, a median of 7 rounds is at most 3.5 minutes at a 30-second timer, and 13 rounds on World Classic is at most 6.5 minutes. At the 60-second default, double those: 7 and 13 minutes. Most turns end well before the timer, so the real figure is lower. With more humans at the table you also wait through everyone else's turns.

Compare that to the board game. Wikipedia's entry on RISK says the game "can be lengthy, requiring several hours to multiple days to finish" and lists the playing time as 1 to 8 hours. A browser version with a timer is a different evening. Our write-up on RISK-style browser games covers other options. CONQUEST is a RISK-style game and is not affiliated with Hasbro.

What these numbers do not tell you

They are bot matches. A human who plays well can end a Frontlines match faster, and one who plays badly can end it faster too, by being eliminated in single-player. Real lobbies with several humans will differ again.

We also have no match length for other games to put next to ours. OpenFront's README describes it as "an online real-time strategy game focused on territorial control and alliance building", and we found no stated match length there or in its engine configuration file, so we do not compare. If you are deciding between real-time and turn-based, our comparison of the two covers the rest.

To check a number yourself, start a match at Frontlines or read the rules and timer options on the CONQUEST how-to-play page.