OpenFront Micro-Boat Spam: Repeated Transport Sends Against a Coast

Direct answer: when does micro-boat spam actually work?

Micro-boat spam works only when the defender’s answer to a fresh 20% boat wave is more expensive, in troops and gold, than the wave is worth to you. Because the boat load is fixed at one fifth of your current troops and a failed boat costs you just five percent of the pool (a 25% malus on retreat), you can afford to throw a stream of cheap waves. But each landed wave resolves as a real land attack, so the tactic converts into territory only if you can convert each beachhead before the defender’s Warship screen, land garrison, and gold sink out-pace you. It is a timing and geometry play, not a “spam until they break” play.

Use two words to name your offense state after every boat returns: pressing or feeding. Pressing means each landed wave is a net gain: you convert tiles, the defender is forced to spend more on the water lane than you spend on the boats, and your pool still regenerates between sends. Feeding means the defender kills or strands your boats cheaply, the 20% wave never becomes a border you hold, and every send is a slow donation of your cap to their income. The v0.34.24 fix matters here: the old exploit let a spammer grow troops past the cap by repeatedly attacking non-bordering targets, so the “infinite spam” the community complains about was largely a pre-2026-10-06 experience. Under the current cap, your spam is bounded by how fast your pool actually regenerates.

The rest of this guide turns that language into checks, a cost table, and two numeric scenarios. The community question that drives it is blunt: “one country can essentially infinity spam small population boats very close to each other and there’s nothing to be done about it.” The answer is that there is something to be done, but only if you run the spam as an offense with a conversion plan, not as a harassment loop with no end state. This guide covers the attacker’s side. For the defender’s side, the coastal boat defense guide and the transport landings guide answer the mirror-image question.

Make the first decision reversible and measurable. Before you send the first boat, name the target tile, the water component that connects your Port to it, the defender’s likely Warship screen tile, and the exact troop count your next boat will carry. That one number is always about 20% of your current pool, because the load is not a slider. If you wanted to send a 5% or 8% boat, the game does not let you; what you control is how often you send, up to three boats in the water at once.

The pool is the whole budget. A spammer with 900,000 troops sends a 180,000 boat; a defender with 300,000 responds with 60,000. The absolute gap is what makes spam asymmetric: your failed boats cost you 5% of a large pool, while the defender’s answer costs them a much larger share of a small pool. Read every send as a withdrawal against a pool that refills at 10 + troops^0.73/4 × (1 - troops/max) per tick. The closer you sit to your cap, the slower the refill in absolute terms, which is exactly the moment a spammer is tempted to stop. Hold the pool above the point where your refill falls below the cost of a single failed boat, or the spam quietly turns into attrition you cannot win.

Read the water before you commit to a boat lane

The first scan is geometric, not economic. A transport only appears if your Port and the target shore share one navigable water component. A “micro” boat to an inland lake or across impassable land is rejected by the pathing; no boat, no wave. So the first thing to confirm is that the lane is reachable at all, and how long the path is. A longer path is a gift to the defender: it gives their Warship more ticks inside the 130-tile target range before your boat touches shore. A short, open component with no enemy Warship on it is the only lane where a cheap wave can arrive unopposed.

Count three distances and keep them separate. The boat path length (tiles to shore) decides how long the wave is exposed. The Warship target range (130 tiles) decides whether their hull can even find the boat before it lands. The distance from their garrison to the landing tile decides how fast a land attack can answer a wave that did land. These three do not collapse into one number. A boat can arrive on a short lane and still be killed by a pre-positioned Warship; it can cross a long lane safely and still be shredded by a land garrison two tiles from the beach. The spam only works when all three are simultaneously unfavorable to the defender.

Mark one landing tile and one fallback tile, the attacker’s version of the defender’s checklist. The landing tile is the shore you want to own after the wave: a beach that opens a border you can march into, not an isolated tile. The fallback tile is the land behind it that keeps your next wave’s path open if the first landing tile flips back. Do not stack every wave on one tile; once the defender learns the landing point, they concentrate the Warship and the garrison there and your whole spam loses. Rotate between two or three reachable shores so the screen has to choose a lane and your other wave arrives where it is absent.

Confirm the mode before sending. A private lobby can disable Ports, transports, or Warships, and that changes the entire calculation. If transports are on but Warships are off, the lane is almost always cheap enough to spam until you break the coast. If Warships are on and the defender has one, the lane cost jumps and you need an escort or a decoy. In a team, a teammate’s Port is not your repair anchor, so your boats can strand if your own Port is captured. In Water Nukes, every strike can re-route the water graph, so re-scan the component after each nuke before you commit the next wave.

Build the spam engine: Port, regen, and the 3-boat cap

The first Port is the on-ramp. It costs 125,000 Gold at the first shared Port/Factory count and enables transports, trade ships, and Warships. You do not need a second Port to spam; you need one Port on the right water component and a pool big enough that a 20% wave is a threat. Building a second Port is only worth it if it opens a second reachable component, because two components mean the defender’s single Warship cannot cover both lanes. A second Port on the same component mostly buys repair and income, not more spam angles.

The three-boat cap is your real throughput limit. You can have at most three transports in the water at once. Each boat moves one tile per tick, so the cap does not limit how many waves you start, it limits how many are airborne. To keep a constant pressure you have to send a replacement boat the tick a previous one lands or returns. If your path is 80 tiles, a wave is airborne for about 80 ticks, and with three slots you can sustain roughly one new wave every 27 ticks at the cap. That is the ceiling: the spam is a metronome, and the metronome’s rate is set by path length divided by three.

Regen decides whether the metronome keeps beating. Your refill is 10 + troops^0.73/4 scaled by how far below your cap you are. A pool at 600,000 of a 1,000,000 cap refills roughly (10 + 600000^0.73/4) × 0.4 per tick; a pool at 200,000 refills much less in absolute terms. The trap is the late-game: once you are near cap, every failed boat (a 5% pool loss) refills slower than it drains, so a spammer at full cap is actually bleeding. The spam is a mid-game weapon. Use it to break a coast while your pool is large enough to refill fast and the defender’s pool is small enough that their answer is expensive, then switch to a normal land invasion once the beachhead is held.

A practical order is: hold your pool above the break-even point; send the first wave to the closest reachable shore; watch whether it lands and converts; if it converts, send the next wave to the fallback tile to lock the border; if it is killed cheaply, stop and re-scan instead of sending more. Keep a written stop line: “stop spaming when my pool refill per tick is below the cost of one failed boat, or when the defender’s Warship is on the lane for three consecutive waves.” Name the line before the first send so the next action is obvious.

Wave math: what each send actually buys

A default boat carries one fifth of your current troops. At 500,000 that is 100,000; at 1,000,000 that is 200,000. The boat is free in Gold, so the only cost of a wave is the troops you embark, which you get back if the boat fails (minus 25%) or which you resolve as a land attack if it lands. That asymmetry is the whole tactic: the attacker’s downside is small and the defender’s response is not.

Suppose you hold 600,000 and the defender holds 350,000 with one Warship on the lane. Your wave carries 120,000. If the Warship kills it in the water, you lose 24,000 (5% of your pool) and the defender loses shell time, not troops. If the boat lands, you conquer the tile and the 120,000 resolves as a land attack against whatever garrison is there. If the defender answers with a 70,000 land attack (20% of their pool) and you are still above it, you keep the tile; if they can put 130,000 on the beach, you lose the conversion. The spam wins the first exchange almost by default, but the conversion is the actual fight, and it is a normal border calculation with a bonus.

The failed-boat economy is why spam is so hard to punish. A boat that retreats because its destination turned to water, or because you abort it, returns 75% of its load. That is a 5% pool cost, cheap enough to throw repeatedly to test lanes, force the Warship to fire, or bait a garrison out of position. A defender who spends gold on a second Warship to stop a 5%-cost test has overspent; a defender who spends land troops to chase a boat that will just retreat has paid full price for nothing. The spammer’s job is to make the defender pay full price for a test, or to land a wave they cannot answer, not to win every individual boat.

Use a conversion table instead of a gut feeling:

Your pool	Boat load (20%)	Failed-boat cost (5% of pool)	You keep the landed tile if you exceed
300,000	60,000	15,000	defender’s beach garrison + their ability to re-attack
600,000	120,000	30,000	roughly 120,000 on the beach, adjusted for their regen
900,000	180,000	45,000	roughly 180,000 on the beach, adjusted for their regen
1,200,000	240,000	60,000	roughly 240,000 on the beach, plus their Warship is almost certainly on the lane

The last column is not a fixed number; it is the defender’s land attack on the beach plus what they can bring back next tick. The table’s real use is the second column: your downside per wave is five percent, so a spammer can afford to be wrong many times. That is the decision-changing fact the community complaint gets at and the defense must respect.

Scenario one: short lane, no Warship, mid-game pool

Assume a mid-game FFA on a map with an open sea component. You hold 620,000 of a 900,000 cap; the defender holds 410,000. Their nearest shore is 45 tiles from your Port and they have no Warship built; they have a 60,000 garrison on the landing tile. No Water Nukes, no Doomsday, normal build time, and they can react to your incoming-unit alert.

The read is pressing. The lane is short (45 tiles, so a wave is airborne only 45 ticks), there is no Warship to kill it, and your 124,000 wave (20% of 620,000) beats their 60,000 garrison with room to spare. The first wave conquers the tile and the 124,000 resolves as a land attack. Send the second wave the moment the first lands, aiming at the fallback tile, so the border behind the beach flips before the defender can re-garrison. Your three-boat cap and the 45-tick path mean you can have a replacement in the water every roughly 15 ticks, so you land a new 124,000 wave faster than the defender can rebuild a 60,000 garrison three tiles back.

The defender’s counterplay is to build a Warship (250,000 Gold) or pull a 100,000 land force onto the beach. If they build the Warship, it is not on the lane for its build and travel time, so you buy 100 or more ticks of free conversion; if they pull land, they trade gold for a garrison that your next 124,000 wave still outruns. Either way you win the first minute, and the question shifts to whether you convert the beach into a held border before they finish the Warship. That is the spam’s true objective: buy the land battle’s first exchange with free 5%-cost waves, then hold the tile as a normal invasion. Watch the incoming-unit alert the moment your second wave drops: if it is not being blocked by a hull on the lane, keep the metronome at full rate; if a Warship icon appears, freeze the queue and re-read the state before the next boat lands.

Stop the spam the moment the Warship is on the lane, because at that point every wave is a shell for them to absorb and your 5% cost is no longer cheaper than their answer. Switch to a standard land push from the held beachhead. The win condition is not “land ten boats”; it is “own a coast tile the defender cannot take back while your pool refills,” and the spam is the cheapest way to make that tile yours in the first place.

Scenario two: long lane, one Warship, near-cap pool

Assume a late-game FFA. You hold 1,150,000 of a 1,200,000 cap; the defender holds 900,000 and runs two Warships on the short sea lane between your Port and their coast. Their shore is 110 tiles away, and they have a 250,000 garrison with a 30-tile Defense Post behind the landing tile. Doomsday is off and both players can build.

The read is feeding, and the correct move is to stop spaming. You are near your cap, so your refill per tick is small: the (1 - troops/max) term has collapsed to about 0.04, meaning your pool barely grows. A failed boat now costs you 5% of a nearly full pool for almost no refill benefit, and your 230,000 wave (20% of 1,150,000) is met by two Warships inside the 130-tile range across a 110-tile lane. The defender kills or strands most of your waves cheaply, and the ones that land meet a 250,000 garrison inside a Defense Post’s multiplier (defender mag ×5, speed ×3), which turns a 230,000 wave into a losing attack.

The spammer’s mistake is reading the pool size as power. At 1,150,000 you have the biggest army, but the spam is a mid-game tool and you have left that window. The fix is to stop sending and play the land: a long, well-supplied land invasion across a held border is far cheaper than a 1,150,000 pool repeatedly throwing 230,000 boats into a double-Warship screen. If you must still use boats, drop to a single wave as a probe (a 5% cost) to force the Warships to fire and reveal their patrol tile, then answer with land. Do not run the metronome here; it is a slow bleed of a pool that no longer refills.

The defender’s counterplay is already in place, and that is the point: two Warships on a short lane and a fortified garrison make the boat lane the most expensive option you have. The spam only wins when the defender has not done this. The decision, therefore, is not “can I spam” but “has the defender spent enough on the water lane that the spam is cheap for me and expensive for them.” In this scenario the answer is no, and the honest read is to abandon the boat lane and win on land. The single probe wave you do send still has value: at a 5% cost it forces one of the two Warships to reveal its patrol tile and commit its shell cooldown, which tells you exactly where to avoid and where your land flanking force should concentrate next.

Failure modes, counterplay, and map adjustments

The first failure is treating spam as an end state. It is not. A spam that never converts a tile into a held border is pure attrition: you are donating five percent at a time while the defender rebuilds for free. The fix is a named conversion plan: each wave has a target tile and a fallback tile, and the spam stops when the tile is held as a normal invasion. If you cannot say what the next landed wave converts, do not send it.

The second failure is spaming near your cap, where refill is slow and a failed boat is a real loss. The fix is the break-even stop line: keep the pool above the point where refill per tick equals the cost of one failed boat, and below the point where the defender’s Warship is confirmed on the lane. The third failure is stacking every wave on one tile, which lets the defender concentrate the screen and the garrison. Rotate between two or three reachable shores so the screen must choose a lane and your other wave arrives where it is absent.

The fourth failure is ignoring the water component. A boat to an inland lake or across impassable land is rejected, and a “short” minimap distance can hide a component boundary that makes the lane unreach-able or absurdly long. Re-scan the component after every nuke or Port capture. The fifth failure is forgetting the mode: if the lobby disables Warships, the lane is almost free and you should spam harder; if it keeps Warships and the defender has two, the lane is the most expensive option you have and you should spam never.

Opponents have reliable counterplay, and you should expect it. They will build a Warship on the lane, pull a land force onto the beach, build a Defense Post behind the landing tile, or use diplomacy to make you think the lane is safe and then spike it with a second Warship. They can also nuke the destination so your boat retreats and eats the 25% malus, or capture your Port so your boats strand. Answer with role separation: a single probe wave to test the lane, a full wave only when the lane is confirmed empty, and a land garrison that holds the beachhead the moment a wave converts. Never let one expensive Warship be the defender’s only answer to a 5%-cost test; that is the overspend you want them to make.

Map shape changes the thresholds. On a compact map a 45-tile lane is the whole game and a short lane with no Warship is a slam-dunk spam. On a large map the same lane can be 200 tiles, so the defender’s Warship has a huge window and you should use boats only as probes. On a strait, one pre-positioned Warship can deny every crossing, so the spam only works if you can reach a component the Warship cannot cover. On an archipelago, two reachable components are worth more than one big pool, because the screen cannot cover both. In team games, assign one player to hold the held beachhead on land while another keeps the boat metronome running; the spam and the invasion are one play, not two.

Mode restrictions are strategic information. If transports are disabled, the whole tactic is gone and you convert to a land invasion. If alliances are disabled, remove diplomatic quiet from your lane test. If Water Nukes are on, treat every crater as a possible re-route and re-scan the component before each wave. The same coast can therefore deserve three different spam plans without any contradiction: probe-and-stop on a long lane with two Warships, full metronome on a short lane with none, and a single probe-and-land in between.

Next reading and an auditable close

After each boat, write one sentence another player could verify: “I send because the lane is 45 tiles with no Warship and my 124,000 beats their 60,000,” or “I stop because my refill is below a failed-boat cost and two Warships are on the lane.” Then check the result on the next important tick: boat landed or killed, pool refill measured, Warship position, and whether the landing tile is now a held border. If the check says the tile is not held and the lane is no longer cheap, the state has moved from pressing to feeding and the spam ends.

Use the coastal boat defense guide to read the mirror image: the Warship screen, the garrison, and the component check from the defender’s side. Use the transport landings guide for the standard invasion that the spam hands off to once a beachhead is held. Use the warship veterancy guide to understand why a veteran Warship on the lane is so much harder to spam past than a fresh one. For the underlying values, check units, structures, and trade mechanics. When the coast is held, continue with the tall versus wide guide to test whether the beachhead should become a deep or a broad mainland position.

All numeric boundaries here are the released v0.34.25 behavior: a fixed boat load of one fifth of the sender’s current troops, a three-transport cap, a 25% malus on a failed or aborted boat, Warship base health 1,000 with 130-tile target range and a 20-tick shell cooldown, a Defense Post that multiplies defender mag by 5 and speed by 3 over 30 tiles, and the v0.34.24 fix that closed the exploit of growing troops past the cap by repeatedly attacking non-bordering targets. If a later formal Release changes any of these, update the table, the scenarios, and the stop line together, and re-verify against the tag before sharing the numbers.

The practical close is a four-line log: state, lane length, Warship count on the lane, and next check. For example: “pressing; 45 tiles; 0 Warships; send 124,000 to the east beach.” If the next check says a Warship is on the lane or your refill has dropped below a failed-boat cost, change the state to feeding and spend the gold on land instead. This small log turns a long guide into a repeatable habit another player can audit after the match, and it keeps the spam honest: a spam you cannot explain in four lines is a spam that is probably just donating troops.

Sources: OpenFront v0.34.25 Release, Config.ts, TransportShipExecution.ts, the Micro boat spamming thread, the Warships guide thread, and the Boat Banking video.