A field manual for FrontWars

Modes: Free for All, Teams and the Chaos badge

Three settings decide everything about a match before it starts: who is on whose side, how fast the economy runs, and whether the lobby is running a preset. Only the first two appear in the single-player panel as read-only labels.

TESTEDthe single-player panel and the lobby cards, read 2026-11-03
IN-GAMEMODE, ECONOMY MODE and the CHAOS badge, quoted from the client
OFFICIAL ONLYSteam lists Classic, Fast and Chaos as modes; the client offers two plus a badge
NEEDS CHECKwhat a CHAOS preset actually changes beyond the chips it prints

A public lobby card on 2026-11-03: North America, the orange CHAOS badge, the purple HUMANS VS NATIONS badge, 0/60 players and a 57 s countdown, with an Instant Build and a +1M Gold chip above the map name. — **What this shows** that mode, team format and modifiers are printed separately on one card, and that the countdown, not the player count, decides when it starts.Captured 2026-11-03Client v42.5Plate 1

Who is on whose side

MODE has two values in the lobby: Free for All and Teams, and both are clickable buttons on the Rules tab of a private lobby. Free for All is what single player fixes for you and what the plain lobby cards show. Teams is the one that fans out into the formats on the cards — we have seen QUADS (TEAMS OF 4), 3 TEAMS and HUMANS VS NATIONS on the carousel in a single session, so treat Teams as a family rather than a single setting.

How fast the economy runs

ECONOMY MODE has two values: Classic and Fast. Both are clickable in a private lobby's Rules tab; the single-player panel prints Classic and the label there is not clickable, so Fast exists only for lobbies. On Classic we measured gold going from 800 at spawn to roughly 130,000 at ninety seconds and about 305,000 at two and a half minutes, which is what makes the first 125,000 city a ninety-second decision rather than a ten-minute one.

The store page mentions three economy modes, Classic, Fast and Chaos. The client prints two, and Chaos appears as a badge on lobby cards instead. The two can both be true and we are not going to pretend we resolved it: we played neither a Fast match nor a Chaos match.

Chaos is a preset, not a setting

The CHAOS badge rides on cards that also carry modifier chips — we have seen +5M Gold, +1M Gold and Instant Build above the map name on the same card as the badge. Two cards captured four minutes apart differed in map (one named, one showing an ellipsis), team format (Free for All 0/50 versus Humans vs Nations 0/60) and chips. So CHAOS is best read as a rules preset built from the same options a host can toggle by hand in a private lobby, not as a fourth economy mode.

What it is not

It is not a different map pool. Both Chaos cards we saw were ordinary maps, one of them North America. The ellipsis on the other card is the client declining to name the map yet, not a secret rotation.

Choosing

For a first match, take Free for All on Classic, which is what the single-player button gives you. Teams is for playing with people and needs a lobby with more than one human, which is exactly where our own testing stopped — a host alone cannot start.

Last checked against the client: 2026-11-03 · client v42.5