OpenFront Nation Beachhead Doctrine: Defend and Exploit the v35 1% Boat Attack

Direct answer: the boat is bait, the land attack is the kill

A v35 nation on Hard or Impossible does not send you a 60% boat wave anymore. It sends one transport carrying about 1% of its troop pool to a tile on your coast, and the tick that boat lands, a fully budgeted land attack pours out of that beachhead toward your core. Defend the one or two tiles it can reach, keep a land reserve sized for a full attack, and put a Warship on the shortest water lane so its 250-damage shells get the 1% boat first. Offensively, the same doctrine works for you: drop a 1% boat on an enemy coast, click the enemy again from the beachhead, and let the second, larger attack do the killing.

The practical upshot is a change in the order you think. In the old world the boat was the threat, so the defense was aimed at the water: keep a Warship on the lane, sink the transports, and the fight was mostly over with the boats. In the new world the water is a decoy you can almost ignore, and the real fight is on the beach and then on land, so the defense is aimed at the ground: pre-commit a wall to the landing tile, and let the boats do their little trick on schedule. This reframing changes what you buy. You no longer need the Warship purely to sink the boat, because a 500-troop boat is cheap to deny even with one or two shells, or with a nuke on the beachhead tile. You need the Warship for the different job the v0.35 nation now does: escorting the boat with its own warship squad, blockading the lanes you do control, and raiding your Port from the water. And you need the troop reserve for a different reason than before, because the enemy’s follow-up now starts the moment the boat lands and grows faster the emptier their reserve is, so your own reserve is what keeps your growth rate ahead of theirs once the land fight opens. The single sentence to carry into any lobby is that the v0.35 nation is not attacking your coast, it is attacking the ground a short distance behind your coast, and the boat is simply the delivery method for that attack.

One more consequence of the reframing is that the window for your decision has moved earlier. You can no longer wait for the boat to commit and then react, because by the time the boat is within sight your wall is already too late to commit and the follow-up is about to begin. The decision is made before the boat leaves the enemy port: you have already chosen the most likely landing tile, already committed the wall, already decided whether the lane is screened, and already decided whether a denial nuke is worth spending. The boat arriving is not the start of the defense, it is the confirmation that your pre-commitment was correct. If you find yourself still deciding which beach to defend when the first transport is visible, you have lost the sequence, and the best available move is to fall back behind your core Cities rather than try to win a coast you did not prepare. The rest of this page is how to make those pre-decisions quickly and correctly, with the exact numbers from the v0.35.2 tag and the release notes so that every choice is grounded in the mechanics that the nation AI actually runs.

What changed and why it feels different

The v0.34 boat pattern was a one-time drain: the attacker committed at most three transports at 20% of selected troops each, and the whole committed force arrived together. A defender could screen the lane, deny the single beach, and counter into the attacker’s depleted home front. The v35 nation AI on Hard and Impossible replaced that with a two-stage pattern, and the first stage is deliberately too small to matter.

The nation’s boat now carries only the floor of 1% of its current troop pool, with a floor of one troop. If the nation holds 50,000 troops, your incoming transport holds about 500. A Warship shell does 250 damage, so two shells sink it — but only if the Warship is inside its 130-tile targeting range when the shells land, and only if the enemy nation has not sent a warship squad of its own to guard the lane. The boat’s job is not to win; it is to own a landing tile on your coast. The moment the boat’s source tile is owned, the nation’s follow-up routine fires: a land attack that starts at the beachhead tile and uses the nation’s normal attack budgeting, so it retains a reserve near its biggest neighbor instead of overcommitting. You are not fighting the boat; you are fighting the land attack that the boat made possible, and you have lost the reaction window you used to have.

Three more v35 facts complete the doctrine. First, nations now route boats around hostile warships instead of sailing straight into them, so a Warship parked in the middle of a strait no longer guarantees the lane is blocked; the nation finds the nearest safe route that lands somewhere else on your coast. Second, if your warships do block the lane, the nation answers with a squad: on Hard it fields as many warships as you have blocking, on Impossible one more than you have, pulling patrolling ships from the same water component or building new ones on the spot, capped at a 10-ship fleet and skipped if it cannot afford them. Third, the sailing cap: a non-beachhead nation on Hard will not sail more than 300 tiles to attack, on Impossible not more than 500, while Easy and Medium have no cap at all — but beachhead nations ignore the cap entirely and will boat you from the far side of the map if that is the only route. The release notes also confirm that Medium-and-above nations stop saving for nukes once they have destroyed three cities, so the nuke threat on your coast now arrives earlier than in v0.34.

The reason the difference is so stark is that v0.34 and v0.35 are answering a different question about what a boat is for. In v0.34 the boat was the attack: the nation wanted to move troops across water and the boat was the cheapest way to do it, so the boat carried the troops you wanted to lose as little as possible, and the whole doctrine was “send as many as I can afford to get across.” In v0.35 the boat is a probe and a delivery vehicle: the nation has separated the act of establishing a foothold from the act of committing force, and it is willing to pay almost nothing for the foothold because the foothold is not where it intends to fight. This is a genuinely different plan of campaign, not a parameter change to the same plan, which is why the defensive reflex that worked in v0.34 (screen the lane, sink the biggest boat, protect the whole coast) fails in v0.35 in a specific and predictable way: it over-invests in the water, spreads the land defense thin across the whole coast instead of concentrating it on one tile, and then gets out-manuevered by a follow-up that arrives on the very tick the over-invested defense is at its weakest.

There is a second shift that is easy to miss and much harder to defend against, and it concerns the nation’s relationship to your warships. In v0.34 a nation’s warships were a thin screen around its own operations, and if you could kill that screen your coast was effectively safe from naval pressure. In v0.35 the nation now navigates around your warships rather than into them, meaning a single warship parked in the waterway no longer guarantees a blockade, because the nation’s routing finds the nearest safe path and lands somewhere else on your coast instead. And if your warships do manage to block the main lane, the nation answers with a warship fleet: it pulls squad patrols from the same basin or builds the ships in place, matching your count on Hard and adding one on Impossible, up to a cap of ten ships, and it skips the escalation only if it cannot afford the gold. Both of these changes raise the cost of the “one warship on the lane” defense you learned in v0.34, and they are the reason the v0.35 defense has to be a land-and-logic defense first and a naval defense second, with the navy doing escort and denial rather than trying to win a sea battle the nation is no longer trying to win.

The decision framework: answer three questions in order

Run these the moment you notice a nation’s transport moving on your water, not after it lands.

Question one: which landing tile? A beachhead nation can reach any tile it can boat to, and it will not sail further than 300 tiles on Hard or 500 on Impossible unless it is using the beachhead route. Map the 300/500-tile circle around the nation’s Port and intersect it with your coast; you should end up with one or two realistic landing tiles, not a whole coastline. Pre-commit a wall to those tiles. Spreading a screen across your entire coast is the exact failure the doctrine is built to exploit: the nation lands at your thinnest point and the follow-up land attack meets no one.

Question two: who owns the water lane? Your Warship’s targeting range is 130 tiles, and the nation routes around warships. A single ship in the strait screens the direct route but not the detour, so the lane question is whether your ship can cover the shortest safe route the nation will actually use. If you can, your 250-damage shells get the 1% boat before it lands and the follow-up never happens. If you cannot afford a Warship — remember the ladder is 250,000 for the first, 500,000 for the second, 750,000 for the third, capped at 1,000,000 — then you are defending with land only, and you must size the wall to the full follow-up attack rather than a 500-troop boat.

Question three: can you make the landing tile impossible? Nuking the landing tile drops fallout, and fallout tiles are impassable; the boat cannot land there and the nation has to pick a new route. This is the cheapest denial you have if the nation is early, and it doubles as a warning shot that your coast is not free. It is also the reason the nuke-economy change matters: the nation is saving its nukes later now, but so are you, and a single nuke on the likely beach tile is worth far more than a nuke on the nation’s land in this specific fight.

The three questions are ordered because the answer to each one constrains the next, and running them out of order is where v0.34 habits bite. If you answer question two (the lane) before question one (the tile), you will park your Warship on a lane that does not actually protect the tile the nation chooses, because you never established where the nation can land. If you answer question three (the nuke) before question one, you spend a denial nuke on a beach the nation does not even use, and the real beach is undefended. The order is tile, then lane, then denial, and it is fast to run in the live game because each question has a concrete artifact you can point at: the 300/500-tile circle gives you the tiles, your Warship’s 130-tile targeting range gives you the lane coverage, and the nuke’s fallout footprint gives you the denial zone. A good test of whether you have internalized the sequence is to ask yourself, with the game paused for one second, which of the three you would do first if two of them were already resolved; if the answer is not “the landing tile,” the rest of the page is the part you still need to read before your next Hard lobby.

Scenario: defending 30,000 troops against a 60,000-troop nation on Hard

Assume a mid-game FFA on a water-heavy map. You hold 30,000 troops against a 45,000 maximum, a first Port, and a first Warship (250,000 Gold spent). A Hard-difficulty nation 220 tiles away across open water holds 60,000 troops. The 300-tile cap on Hard means it can and will sail to you; the beachhead route means it will not announce the size.

The nation sends a transport with 600 troops (1% of 60,000). Your Warship is on the shortest lane and inside 130 tiles of the crossing point, so it sinks the transport with two 250-damage shells; the beachhead never materializes and the nation loses 600 troops it has to regrow. That is the full win for this exchange, and the important part is what you did not do: you did not commit your 30,000 land troops to chase the boat, and your growth rate is still high because your pool is far below 45,000.

Now assume the nation routes around your Warship and lands the 600-troop boat on a second beach you had not walled. The follow-up land attack fires from that beach. Because the nation’s attack budgeting keeps a reserve near its biggest neighbor, the land attack arrives at roughly 10,000–15,000 troops, not 60,000. Your wall on that tile should be at least 15,000 to fight at parity with headroom. If the wall holds, the nation’s beachhead is a 600-troop poke that cost it 15,000 committed troops while your coast stays intact; if the wall is thinner than the attack, the beachhead becomes a hole in your front and the fight is now a land war one tile from your cities, which is the worst place to be.

The arithmetic that decides the scenario is simple: you win the coastal fight when the cost of the nation’s beachhead plus the cost of its follow-up exceeds what your wall lost, because its regrowth is slower while its pool is drained. The 1% boat costs it almost nothing; the follow-up is where it bleeds. So your wall sizes itself against the follow-up, not the boat.

The deeper lesson of the scenario is about what you are actually spending in each of the three exchanges. In the first exchange you spent two shells of a Warship that cost 250,000, against a boat that cost the nation a few hundred troops and a single transport ship; the economic cost to you is essentially zero and the economic cost to the nation is a transport plus the 600 troops, so the exchange is strongly in your favor and you should take it whenever the Warship is in range. In the second exchange you spend a wall of 15,000 troops, against a follow-up that commits 10,000 to 15,000 of the nation’s force; the economic cost to you is the 15,000 and the economic cost to the nation is roughly the same, so the exchange is even, and the advantage is that the nation’s pool is now below its maximum while yours is still far below yours, so your regrowth rate is higher and you recover the wall before the nation recovers the follow-up. The scenario therefore teaches you to take the first exchange freely, to treat the second exchange as a coin flip you win on regrowth, and to never let the second exchange become a third, because a third exchange on the same tile is where the nation’s warship squad shows up and the fight stops being a land fight.

The offensive version of the doctrine is the exact mirror image of the defensive one, and that mirror image is why the v35 nation is so dangerous and why you can be too. The nation’s plan is cheap foothold first, committed force second, and it wins because the second stage is bigger than the defender’s wall and cheaper to launch than the defender’s economy can respond to. Your plan is the same: a cheap 250-troop foothold that the nation’s defense is built to deny but not built to kill, followed by a committed 9,000-troop land attack from the beachhead that the nation’s defense is not built to meet, because the nation fortifies its land front, not its water. The two stages have to happen on the same tick of your attention, because if you launch the 250-troop boat and then wait, the nation’s new defensive behavior will grow a few thousand troops on the beach tile, and your 9,000 still wins but wins expensively. If you launch the 250-troop boat and immediately follow with the 9,000, the nation’s beach defense is still in the act of forming and your committed force arrives before it is at full strength, which is the difference between a clean win and a bloody one.

Scenario: using the doctrine on a nation you are losing to

You are behind a nation 25,000 to 40,000 and its land front is fortified, which is exactly what v35 nations do before they attack — they build defense posts behind the front, and the release notes confirm they no longer stack posts on the same tile. The direct land attack will fail. Your port is on the coast, and the nation’s coast is 180 tiles across water from your Port.

Send 1% of your 25,000 pool: 250 troops in one boat to a nation beach tile you choose, ideally near a cluster of its defense posts rather than its cities, because the follow-up attack starts from the beachhead and the posts face the land front, not the water. Click the nation again once the boat lands and commit a second attack from the beachhead. Your second attack carries your normal budgeted force — say 9,000 troops — and it arrives at a coast the nation is not fortifying. The nation’s new v35 defensive behavior is that it now defends against boat landings at the beachhead, so expect a few thousand of its troops on that tile; your 9,000 against a few thousand at a beach it cannot quickly reinforce wins, and you now hold land on the nation’s coast. From that land you can push at the land front the nation spent its gold fortifying, from the side it is not defending. The 250-troop boat was never the attack; it was the ticket.

Three things decide whether this offensive actually works, and all three are about timing rather than troop strength. First, the 250-troop boat and your 9,000 follow-up must be committed on the same tick. The follow-up only fires the moment the boat’s source tile is owned, so if you land the boat and then pause to build, the nation’s new v35 defensive behavior — it now defends boat landings at the beachhead — gives it a free few seconds to throw a few thousand troops onto that tile, and your 9,000 arriving late into a reinforced beach is a much tighter fight than the 9,000 arriving at an empty one. Second, choose the beach tile by where the nation is not looking: its defense posts face the land front, so a landing near the posts rather than the cities hits the one direction it has not walled. Third, budget the follow-up for regrowth, not just the wall. You hold the tile after the fight, and the nation’s drained pool regrows fastest exactly while your just-spent pool is slowest; the offensive only pays off if your 9,000 is a fraction of your pool so that you keep regrowing into the next push. The failure mode of this scenario is overreach: the 250-troop boat is cheap enough that you can afford to try it against a fortification that is slightly too hard, and the temptation is to keep spending follow-ups at a beach the nation can now reinforce from two directions. The stop-loss rule is the same as the defensive one — if the beach tile is not yours within your first follow-up, abandon the beach and fall back to the land front; the ticket has expired, and a dead beach is worth less than a live wall on your own coast.

When it fails, and the counters

The boat lands and you never saw it. On a large map the nation can sail outside your vision and outside your 130-tile Warship screening. Counter: keep the Warship on patrol in the nearest water component, not docked at home; a patrolling ship at 100-tile patrol range catches the crossing, and a docked ship does not. If you cannot keep a ship out there, nuke the likely beach tiles in the 300/500-tile band as a pre-emptive denial.

The nation brings a warship squad. If your Warship blocks the lane, the Hard nation fields an equal squad and the Impossible nation fields one more; on a 10-ship fleet it will build the ships on the spot if it can afford them. Do not trade one-for-one at the lane if you are the smaller fleet: withdraw your ship, let the 1% boat land at your pre-walled tile, and fight the follow-up on land where your wall holds. The squad chases you across the water; your wall just needs to outlast the follow-up.

You committed the reserve to the coast. This is the v34 failure, compressed. If your pool is at maximum when the boat lands, your growth rate is at its slowest exactly while the nation’s drained pool is regrowing fastest, and you are losing the race by a few hundred troops per second. The counter is structural: never let the reserve sit above roughly 80% of your maximum while a nation with a Port exists on your map.

The nuke arrives first. Medium-and-up nations stop saving for nukes at three destroyed cities, so the coast nuke now lands mid-game. Fallout on your beach tile kills the beachhead route — which is good for you — but fallout on your cities is the bad version. Counter: keep at least one city out of the nation’s nuke band and spend the denial nukes on beach tiles while the nation’s nuke count is still low, because the nuke ladder is exponential and the later you deny, the more the nation can throw back.

The common thread through all four failure modes is the same structural error repeated at different scales: the defense is sized and placed for the boat, when the boat is the cheapest part of the enemy’s plan. The boat is cheap precisely so that you will over-invest in denying it and under-invest in the land attack that follows. Every counter above is therefore a version of the same rule stated as a specific move — put the warship where the lane is, not where the boat is; size the wall to the follow-up, not the 1% load; keep the reserve below the ceiling while the enemy has a port; spend the denial nukes on the beach tiles early. If you can say those four things in that order without pausing, the section is internalized; if one of them stalls, that is the one to drill in your next session, because the v0.35 nation will keep testing exactly the failure mode you have not yet closed, and the game does not give you a second lobby to find out which one it was.

Mode and map adjustments

Difficulty. Easy and Medium nations do not run the beachhead doctrine at all — landsBeachheads() is false for them — but they have no 300/500-tile sailing cap either, so a Medium nation can boat you from anywhere on the map with the old 20%-of-selected boats. The v35 defense is a Hard/Impossible problem; on Easy/Medium the v34 playbook still applies, except that the nation also routes around your warships and stops saving for nukes at three cities on Medium and up.

Hard. The 300-tile cap is your friend: any nation further than 300 tiles from your coast cannot non-beachhead you, and even beachhead boats must sail from a Port within the map’s water. Your screen zone is the 300-tile band, and one Warship plus walled tiles inside it is a complete defense.

Impossible. The 500-tile cap, the extra warship in every squad, and the free beachhead routing mean the band to defend is nearly the whole water body. Defense shifts from the coast to the nuke: dening beach tiles with fallout is cheaper than a second Warship once the cost ladder reaches 750,000, and the squad at your blockades means you should not commit your ship to a lane fight you cannot win.

Team games and HumansVsNations. In HumansVsNations the nations attack the humans regardless of difficulty, and the beachhead behavior still only applies on Hard/Impossible, so check your lobby settings. In team FFA the nation also backs up teammate nations, so a beachhead on your coast can be reinforced from an allied nation’s direction; wall the two most likely tiles, not the one, and hold the reserve for the second vector.

The map matters as much as the difficulty, because the doctrine’s two core numbers — the 300/500-tile sailing cap and the 130-tile warship targeting range — interact with the map’s water geometry. On a map where the nation’s Port is on a small peninsula jutting into open water, the 300-tile circle on Hard may cover the entire reachable coast, which means every one of your beach tiles is a realistic landing site and the “pick one or two tiles” advice degrades to “pick the two nearest your core cities and accept that the others are open.” On a map where the nation is across a wide strait, the circle may cover only a narrow slice of your coast, and the defense compresses into a single walled tile with the warship in the strait, which is the cleanest version of the doctrine and the easiest one to play. The practical rule is to measure the water width to the nation’s Port before the game starts, not after: if it is under 300 tiles on Hard, the doctrine applies and you plan the wall and the warship; if it is over 300 tiles, the nation can only beachhead you and cannot non-beachhead you, which narrows the threat to the beachhead-only pattern and lets you ignore the 20% boat entirely.

Numbers at a glance

Fact	v0.35.2 value	What it means for you
Beachhead boat load	max(1, floor(nation troops / 100))	The boat is bait; size your wall for the land attack, not the boat
Follow-up timing	Land attack fires the tick the boat’s source tile is owned	No reaction window; pre-commit the wall
Sailing cap	Easy/Medium none, Hard 300, Impossible 500; beachhead routes ignore it	Your screen zone is the 300/500-tile band around the nation’s Port
Too-weak filter	Hard/Impossible skip attacks below 20% of target troops	Small pokes from a nation are not coming; the beachhead is its minimum
Warship squad at blockades	Hard = equal fleet, Impossible = fleet + 1; max 10 ships; gold-checked	Do not lane-fight a bigger squad; withdraw and fight on land
Warship cost	250k / 500k / 750k / 1M	The second ship doubles the price; nuke denial becomes cheaper late
Warship targeting range	130 tiles (250-damage shells, patrol range 100)	Keep the ship patrolling the crossing, not docked at home
Nuke saving	Medium+ stop saving after three cities destroyed	Coast nukes arrive mid-game; deny beach tiles early
Warship shell damage	250 per shell	Two shells delete the 500-troop beachhead wall; budget follow-ups the same way
Follow-up budget	Your normal committed force (e.g. 9,000)	The follow-up is the real attack; the 1% boat is the trigger, not the spend

The table is a decision tree, not a reference sheet, and the rows should be read in the order the doctrine is decided: the boat load and follow-up timing tell you what you are actually defending against (the land attack, not the boat), the sailing cap and too-weak filter tell you when the doctrine applies and what its minimum is, the warship rows tell you where the ship goes and how many you can afford, and the nuke row tells you when the coast threat stops being a boat problem and becomes a fallout problem. One number in the table changes the whole calculation more than the rest: the 750,000 warship cost, because at that price the second ship is a double spend and nuke denial on beach tiles becomes cheaper — which is the single reason Impossible-difficulty defense shifts from the warship to the nuke. If you remember only one row, make it the 300/500-tile sailing cap, because it is the number that tells you whether the doctrine is even live in your lobby before you have spent a shell.

Reading your next move

This page owns the question “a v35 nation is beachheading me, or I want to beachhead one — what do I do.” If you are defending a classic 20% boat wave instead of the 1% beachhead, the coastal boat defense guide is the v0.34 version of this exact fight and still governs Easy/Medium lobbies. If you are the one choosing where to land and how to build the beach you push from, the transport landings guide is the attacker’s page for the same water mechanics. If the open question in your head is whether to buy the second Warship and where to park it, the warship fleet decisions guide carries that spend-and-placement decision, and if your problem is an island rather than a mainland coast, the island defense guide is the narrower page. Finally, if the nation’s problem with you is the nuke — not the boat — the nation strike protocol guide covers surviving the v35 nuke-then-attack sequence that this beachhead often pairs with. The one habit worth taking into every lobby from this page is the order of the questions: landing tile first, lane second, denial third. Get that order right and the 1% boat is a 500-troop nuisance you delete with two shells; get it wrong and the same boat is the first move of a land war on your home coast.

Which of the five linked guides to open next depends on which side of the doctrine you are on and what the open question in your head actually is, so the reading order is a selection map rather than a fixed list. If you are the defender and the fight in front of you is a classic 20% boat wave on an Easy or Medium lobby, the coastal boat defense guide is the right page, because the beachhead doctrine this page describes is not running at those difficulties and the v0.34 numbers govern your lobby. If you are the attacker choosing the landing tile and the beach you push from, the transport landings guide is the attacker’s page for the same water mechanics and the tile-selection logic is the same. If the decision stuck in your head is purely the warship spend — buy the second ship, where to park it, when the second ship is not worth 500,000 — the warship fleet decisions guide owns that decision and this page only tells you the ship belongs in the crossing, not the doctrine. If your coast is an island rather than a mainland edge, the island defense guide is the narrower page and the water-geometry advice here compresses because an island has no “behind the coast” to fall back to. And if the threat you are actually losing to is the nuke landing on your cities rather than the boat on your beach, the nation strike protocol guide covers the nuke-then-attack sequence that the beachhead often pairs with, and the nuke is the cheaper denial once the warship cost ladder reaches 750,000. The one thing every reading path shares is the same opening move: check your lobby difficulty first, because the v0.34 pages and this v0.35 page describe the same fight with different numbers, and reading the wrong version of the page is the only error that makes the whole doctrine look broken when it is actually just not running in your lobby.