These eight things will keep you alive and moving up the board in SFC2. None of them are complicated. Almost every player who writes in about a lost fleet lost it to rule 1.
1. Learn to fleet save
Ships that are flying cannot be touched. An attack can only be aimed at a planet or a moon, so anything in transit is safe. That is the whole trick. If your fleet sits at home while you are asleep or at work, sooner or later somebody bigger finds it.
SFC2 gives you a button for this. Open Fleets, pick Fleet Save as the mission, type a destination, load your ships and as much ore, crystal and hydrogen as they will carry, choose a speed and press Save Fleet. The fleet flies out and turns straight back around. Nothing is left at home for anyone to take. See Fleet / Resource Saving for the longer version.
The Duration in the summary is one way, so a five hour save is ten hours there and back. Set the speed so the fleet lands after you are awake, not before. Slower also burns less hydrogen.
You do not have to do this on day one. Until you reach 750 resources spent points you are under newbie protection and no player can attack you, or be attacked by you. The game puts a notice on your screen the moment you cross that line. After that the rank gap still shields you for a while: two players can only fight if the smaller one has at least a fifth of the larger one's resources spent points, and that limit only lifts once you are both over 25,000. Long before you get there, saving should be a habit.
Do not talk yourself into being too small to bother with. Thirty percent of what a destroyed ship cost turns into debris, and a Dionysus Class Recycler picks it up. So an attacker can throw cheap ships at you as fodder, lose badly on paper, and still walk away ahead. On top of that, a winning attacker takes half of whatever resources are sitting on the planet.
Two things soften the blow when you cannot get a save out. A Resource Den shelters a fixed amount of each resource from plunder no matter how the battle goes. And your warehouses have a ceiling: once a resource hits the cap the mine stops adding to it, so a big pile is wasted production as well as bait.
2. Build mines
Mines are the only thing in the game that pays you every hour whether you log in or not, and they get worse the higher you push them. The first ten or so levels of an Ore Mine pay for themselves in under a day. By the low twenties you are waiting a week or more, and by the mid twenties one upgrade takes about a month to earn back what it cost.
Ore is the cheapest to raise, crystal is slower, and the Hydrogen Synthesizer is slowest of the three. Build it anyway, because hydrogen is fuel and every fleet you send burns some. Hydrogen also comes out faster on cold planets, so a colony out at the edge of a system is worth more than it looks.
Mines run on energy. Watch the Energy bar on the Buildings page, because if it is short every mine on the planet drops below its listed rate. Add Solar Array levels, and a Nuclear Power Plant once you can spare the hydrogen it eats. Each mine also has a capacity dropdown, so you can throttle one down and hand its energy to another.
Only one thing can be under construction on a planet at a time, so think about the order. Several cheap upgrades on a young colony beat one expensive upgrade at home. See Mines for the numbers.
3. Tech up
A.I. Tech is the first one to chase. Every level adds one fleet slot, and a slot is used by every mission you run and every fleet you send, including your nightly save. At level 1 you can barely do anything. At level 8 you can run missions off several planets and still have room to save.
Expedition Tech is the mission tech. It unlocks the longer missions one at a time and adds thirty percent per level to what every mission pays out. The running total is printed at the top of the Missions page.
The Dionysus Class Recycler is worth rushing. It clears debris fields, which is free resources, and its cargo hold makes it the ship you load up when you save. The Poseidon Class Cruiser opens the middle of the mission list and does well against players who have leaned on Artemis Class Fighters and Missile Batteries.
Research is empire wide and only one thing runs at a time, but it runs out of the Research Lab on the planet you have selected, so keep one good lab and start your research from there. Once you research the Advanced Research Communication Network, the best labs across your planets start counting together instead.
4. Build colonies quickly
You can hold ten planets. Moons do not count against that, so a full account is ten planets plus whatever moons you have made. The players at the top of the board are almost always the ones who filled their slots early.
You colonize with a Gaia Class Colony Ship sent from the Galaxy page. Where you put it matters. The slot number sets the temperature and roughly how many fields the planet gets. Slots 4 through 9 are the roomiest, slots 1 through 3 are hot and cramped, and the outer slots are cold, smaller, and better at hydrogen.
Once a colony exists, put mines on it right away. Low mine levels are the best return in the game, so a handful of colonies with level 8 mines beats a homeworld with level 25 mines.
The overnight version of this: load your fleet save with everything you have and send it to your least developed planet. The resources land where they do the most good, and they are in the air while you sleep.
Some players keep one slot free on purpose. When you pick a fight, drop a colony near your target, save your fleet to it, and you can hit them several times in the time one run from home would take.
5. Raid inactive players and NPCs
A player who has not logged in for seven days gets a small i beside their name in the Galaxy view, and after twenty one days it turns into a capital I. Inactive players lose every protection they had. Newbie protection and the rank gap stop applying, so anyone can hit them.
They are usually the best resources per hour you will find, because nobody is spending what their mines are making. Scout before you launch. The eye icon on a Galaxy row sends Hermes Class Probes and the report comes back as a message telling you what is on the planet and what is guarding it. If you have a moon, build an Oracle on it: one scan sweeps fifteen systems each way and lists the inactive players in range in one go.
Do not sit on a good one forever. Accounts that stay quiet long enough get cleared out of the universe and their slots go back into the pool.
NPC encounters are the other soft target, and the safest one there is. They appear as their own rows in the Galaxy view with names like Enemy Fleet or Floating Colony, up to four in a solar system, and they are sized against the players living nearby. No protection sits between you and an NPC, so you can farm them from your first day, and they never come back at you later.
The colour of the row tells you how hard the fight is for a fleet your size. Gray is trivial, blue is easy, amber is challenging, red is dangerous, and hovering it gives you a number for where inside that band it sits. Stay in the gray and blue range unless you are happy to lose ships, and send a probe first when you are not sure.
They do not hang around. An encounter lives somewhere between five and twenty four hours depending on the neighbourhood, and the resources on it drain as people hit it, so take a good one when you find it. One thing to know before you build your whole game around them: destroying NPC ships only counts half toward your destroyed ships points, so farming NPCs fills your warehouses much faster than it climbs the combat board.
6. Run missions
Missions are free resources for a fleet that would be parked anyway. They cost a fleet slot each, they never lose you a ship, and the payout climbs with Expedition Tech.
They are not the whole game though. Mines and colonies build the rank, missions top it up. Send out whatever you are not using, but do not plan your day around them.
Once a planet has a Capitol you also get Secret Missions. Those build an NPC base scaled to your current strength and send your fleet through a wormhole to fight it. You can only have one running at a time.
7. Scale your defenses with the planet
Defense is cheaper to keep than a fleet, because seventy percent of everything destroyed on the ground is rebuilt after the battle. Defenses also leave no debris, so an attacker who burns ships punching through your grid gets nothing back for them. A well defended planet with nothing loose sitting on it is simply a bad trade.
What defense will not do is replace fleet saving. A big enough fleet gets through any wall, and then it takes half your resources and any ships parked behind it. Plenty of new players sink everything into turrets and end up with a slow planet and a dead fleet anyway. Put it in mines, research and colonies instead, and keep saving.
How much you build depends on how you play. If you attack a lot you need very little, because your fleet is rarely home. If you would rather mine in peace, a deep grid plus Decoys to soak damage and Anti-Ballistic Missiles to stop incoming missiles makes most people look elsewhere. See Defenses.
If you want a stretch where nobody can touch you at all, there are two switches in Settings under Protection. Diplomacy Mode is free, takes twenty four hours to come on, and cuts your resource production by 25 to 75 percent depending on your size. PVE Mode is a store item that shuts off player combat in both directions for a set number of days with no production hit. Neither one protects you once you have gone inactive.
8. Be civil
You are going to get attacked. That is the game. Losing a fleet stings and the temptation is to fire something rude back at whoever did it. Do not. The quickest way to turn one attack into a month of attacks is to make it personal. People will fly waves at you that make them no profit at all, just to make a point.
A polite reply, or no reply, costs you nothing and usually ends it there. If somebody genuinely crosses a line, the Rules link at the bottom of every page says where that line is, and Support is the place to take it rather than the message system.
Based on the original Starfleet Commander guide by Matt, codename_B and The ZPM.
Comments
New version Looks Good.
One thing though, in the section about innactives….
“A player who has not logged in for seven days gets a small i beside their name in the Galaxy view, and after twenty one days it turns into a capital I. Inactive players lose every protection they had. Newbie protection and the rank gap stop applying, so anyone can hit them.”
Inactives don’t actually lose every protection they had in this version of the game. Those in P mode stay in P mode until that runs out. Those in D or V appear to stay that way as well.
While there are a lot of Debris fields out there, My recommendation is always this: Scale your Recycling fleet along with your attack fleet. Slow your attack fleet down with a single Recycler (to save fuel) and then send recyclers immediately after the attack. Both fleets should arrive within seconds of each other, and you should pick up all of the debris you create in your battle.
If you are unable to pick up all of the debris you are creating, then you need to build more recyclers.
There seems to be no reference to NPCs in the 8 Rules Section. This needs to be updated.
The 8 Rules has been a valuable tool for new players for over a decade. Should be nice to have it updated and handy for referencing to aim those new to the game.
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