OpenFront Amphibious Defense — Warships, Not Walls

You cannot choose where to block a landing. Whatever tile the attacker clicks, the game selects the nearest shore tile of yours they can reach by water. Your entire coastline is a candidate.

And the landing tile itself is taken for free. The moment the boat arrives that tile is conquered with no loss calculation, and the actual fight begins with the attack launched from it. A defense post cannot save that first square.

Which leaves exactly one reliable answer: break them at sea.

Why you cannot pick the spot

The target selection works like this:

where the attacker clicks  →  the defender's shore tile nearest by water
                              that the attacker can actually reach
where the boat departs     →  the attacker's own shore nearest by water
                              to that target

Shores facing landlocked lakes are excluded — the water route has to connect, so a lake cut off from the open sea is never chosen. Put the other way round: every shore touching open water is live.

Measure your coastline with the M grid and it becomes obvious why “cover it all” is not a plan — see measuring distance on screen.

The first tile is free

This is the part most often misunderstood.

So defense posts, terrain coefficients, and troop ratios all apply from step 3 onwards. A post on the coast does not prevent the landing; it makes pushing inland from it expensive. That is still worth a lot — but set your expectations correctly. See defense post placement.

If the two of you are allied there is no fight at all — the troops just join you. An allied “landing” is reinforcement, not a threat.

Why warships are the answer

When a warship picks a target within range, it sorts by unit type first.

Type beats distance. An enemy warship right next to it loses to a transport at the edge of range. Nothing else in the game is built this squarely for the job.

• 130-tile targeting, 100-tile patrol — the patrol circles a port
• Ten transport kills per veterancy level (max 3, each +20% health and damage). On a coast that gets raided often, your warships get stronger on their own
• Full numbers in the warship guide

They only get three at once

A player can field three transport ships at a time, which works in the defender’s favour.

• Break all three and they start over
• While three are committed to you, they cannot send any elsewhere — tying them down is itself defense
• On offense, the same cap is the question of whether to commit all three at once or feed them in

Practical order

1. Build the port first. Warships need one, and their patrol circles it — see port placement
2. Put the warship on your longest coast — check with the grid which position covers the most shoreline within 130 tiles
3. Put defense posts inland of the likely landing spots, not on the beach — the first tile is lost anyway; what you want is an expensive second step
4. Leave a warship on a frequently raided coast — it levels up there, so the position defends itself better over time

Common misconceptions

“Being landlocked makes me safe.” True — no shore on open water means no landings. But with WATER NUKES enabled, one warhead creates coastline where there was none. See water nukes.

“I’ll line the coast with defense posts.” The first tile is lost regardless, and posts do not stack within their radius. For landings specifically, the same gold buys more in warships.

“I’ll mass troops on the coast.” Troops are not attached to tiles — they are a single pool, and there is no way to station them anywhere. See why your troops stopped growing.

For the actual exchange rate, put the landing force and your own troops into the combat loss calculator.