x2 Then x3, or One x5? The Simple Math Behind Crowd Gate Games

By Codixus Games · 26 October 2026

Gate math in Mob Control style games is shorter than it looks: multiply the multipliers, and if a lane has an add gate, take it before the multiplier it feeds. That is the whole trick. Say you start with 10 units and face two lanes. One lane has an x2 gate followed by an x3 gate. The other has a single x5. The first lane gives 10 x 2 x 3 = 60 and the second gives 10 x 5 = 50, because 2 x 3 is 6 and 6 is more than 5.

One caution before the numbers. Mob Control is Voodoo's game, and its official pages describe multiplier gates and moving gates without listing gate values. So every number below is a plain example, not a claim about any one game's levels. We make Gloopstorm, a different game, and we are not affiliated with Voodoo.

What a multiplier gate does to a crowd

A multiplier gate takes the crowd you have and scales it. Voodoo's page for Mob Control sells the appeal as "watching your mob multiply as you aim and shoot at the gates." In a Naavik podcast episode on the game's rise, Voodoo general manager Miguel Santirso describes the core loop: a cannon shoots characters, and they pass through multiplying gates until one character can become a hundred. The same arithmetic applies to any crowd runner or crowd battle game built around multiplier gates.

Three kinds of gate are worth naming, because each one behaves differently:

• A multiplier gate (x2, x3, x5) multiplies the crowd. Its value grows with your crowd: an x2 is worth more units to a crowd of 100 than to a crowd of 10.
• An add gate (+5, +20) adds a fixed number. It is worth the same to a small crowd and a large one.
• A penalty gate (-4, or a split in half) takes units away.

Official Mob Control pages confirm multipliers. Add and penalty gates are what-if cases: we found no official page describing them for that game, but the rules below cover them.

x2 then x3 versus a single x5

Start with 10 units and run the lane options by hand:

• x2 then x3: 10 x 2 = 20, then 20 x 3 = 60.
• x3 then x2: 10 x 3 = 30, then 30 x 2 = 60. Same answer.
• One x5: 10 x 5 = 50.
• x2 then x2: 10 x 2 x 2 = 40, which is less than a single x5.
• x2, x2, x2: 10 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 80, which is more than a single x5.

Two things show up. First, swapping the two gates changed nothing. Wikipedia's page on the commutative property says an operation is commutative "if changing the order of the operands does not change the result," and multiplication of numbers qualifies. Math Is Fun puts it plainly: "we can swap numbers over and still get the same answer." Grouping does not matter either, so a chain of three gates needs no special handling.

Second, you can compare lanes without knowing the crowd size. Multiply the gate values in each lane and the bigger product wins. Here are all six pairs you can make from x2, x3 and x5 gates:

• x2 and x2: 4
• x2 and x3: 6
• x2 and x5: 10
• x3 and x3: 9
• x3 and x5: 15
• x5 and x5: 25

So x2 then x3 (6) beats a lone x5 (5) by 20 percent: 60 against 50 at a crowd of 10. According to Gamezebo's Mob Control strategy guide from January 2023, "An x2 followed by an x3 will get you more units than an x4 on its own, for example."

Whole-number multipliers never need rounding, so the ratio is always 6 to 5: a crowd of 3 gives 18 against 15, and a crowd of 3,000 gives 18,000 against 15,000.

Add then multiply, or multiply then add

Order starts to matter the moment an add gate enters the lane. Take a crowd of 10, a +5 gate and an x2 gate:

• Add first: (10 + 5) x 2 = 15 x 2 = 30.
• Multiply first: 10 x 2 + 5 = 20 + 5 = 25.

Adding first is worth 5 more, because the +5 got doubled along with everything else. The gap is the add value times one less than the multiplier:

• With an x2: add first gives 30, multiply first gives 25, a gap of 5.
• With an x3: add first gives 45, multiply first gives 35, a gap of 10.
• With an x5: add first gives 75, multiply first gives 55, a gap of 20.

Math Is Fun's distributive law is this exact effect: "3 lots of (2+4) is the same as 3 lots of 2 plus 3 lots of 4." In gate terms, a multiplier gate scales an add gate it follows, so the +5 before an x5 is really worth 25 units, while the same +5 after the x5 is worth just 5.

There is a trap here. You may remember that multiplication goes before addition, and Wikipedia's page on the order of operations gives 1 + 2 x 3 = 7, not (1 + 2) x 3 = 9. But that rule is about reading a written expression. A lane is a sequence. Pass a +2 gate and then an x3 gate with a crowd of 1, and you get (1 + 2) x 3 = 9.

Penalty gates run the other way. With a crowd of 10, a -4 gate and an x3 gate give (10 - 4) x 3 = 18 if the penalty comes first, and 10 x 3 - 4 = 26 if it comes second. When the penalty comes first, the x3 triples it too: you lose 12 units instead of 4. So prefer the lane where penalties come after the multipliers and adds come before them.

Which gate to pick in a Mob Control style lane

If the gate order in a lane is fixed, your choices are which lane to take and which gate to aim at first. Three habits cover most of them.

First, write each lane as a short sequence and run it. Say your crowd is 10. The left lane is one x3 gate: 10 x 3 = 30. The right lane is an x2, then a +4, then another x2: 10 x 2 = 20, plus 4 is 24, times 2 is 48. The right lane's biggest gate is only an x2, and it still wins by 18 units.

Second, remember that a multiplier is worth more as the crowd grows. What a multiplier gate gains you is the crowd times one less than its value. At a crowd of 10, an x2 adds 10, an x3 adds 20 and an x5 adds 40. At a crowd of 100 those become 100, 200 and 400. An add gate stays flat. A +50 gate beats an x2 only while your crowd is under 50, beats an x3 only under 25, and beats an x5 only under 12.5. So fat add gates matter early in a lane and rarely late.

Third, watch for gates that move. Voodoo's page lists "multipliers, moving gates, and more" among the level elements. The Gamezebo guide advises that on levels with a moving gate, "you should usually try to move your cannon at the same speed to get the most out of the multiplication." A gate you cannot line up is not worth its face value. The next section is about that gap.

When the math says one thing and the lane says another

Gate math assumes you pass every gate you plan to pass. Real aim is not perfect, so ask how often you will hit each gate. Here is a simple model, and it is our own toy model rather than any game's rule: a gate you miss counts as x1, and your two shots are independent.

Take the x2-then-x3 route against a sure x5 at a crowd of 10. If you hit both gates you reach 60. If you hit only the x2 you reach 20, and only the x3 gives 30. Miss both and you stay at 10. At an 80 percent hit rate per gate, the average outcome is 0.64 x 60 + 0.16 x 20 + 0.16 x 30 + 0.04 x 10 = 46.8. That is below the 50 a sure x5 gives.

The break-even sits near an 85 percent hit rate per gate. The average multiplier for two gates at hit rate p is (1 + p) x (1 + 2p), and setting that equal to 5 gives p of about 0.85. Below that hit rate, the sure x5 wins on average. Above it, the two smaller gates win.

Two more limits:

• Units are a means, not the goal. What counts is how many reach the next fight, and a lane that looks great on paper can cost you time or position.
• Our examples treat the crowd as one number that each gate changes in turn. If a game multiplies each unit separately, the multiplier results still hold: doubling every unit and then tripling every unit gives six for each original unit. For add gates we assume one addition to the whole crowd. We found no official source on how Mob Control handles that, so we make no claim about it.

Practice the math with slimes

If you want to try gate planning in a game we know well, Gloopstorm is ours. It is made by Codixus Games, the team behind this blog, and it is not affiliated with Voodoo or Mob Control. Weigh this part accordingly.

Gloopstorm: Slime Crowd Battle is a portrait game for iPhone, iPad and Android. You play with one finger, shoot jelly slimes through x2, x3 and x5 gates, grow the crowd and siege the Gloom castle. When the King meter fills, you can launch King Slime into the battle. There are 60 levels across six kingdoms: Candy Meadow, Rainy Garden, Bubble Bath, Salt Flats, Toy Attic and Gloom Lab. Each kingdom ends with a Colossus boss fight. There is no PvP, and every level is winnable without upgrades.

It is free to play, with ads and optional in-app purchases, and no purchase is needed to win a level. There are no ads during a level.

We are not listing level layouts or in-game results here. The examples above are plain arithmetic, not readouts from the game. If you want more crowd battle notes, the Gloopstorm blog has them, and our list of games like Mob Control covers where to play the genre. The Gloopstorm home page has the overview of how a level plays.