This guide is for players a few weeks in who log in more than once a day and want to raid rather than sit still. Most people build a wall and wait behind it. Attacking climbs the board faster, pays better and teaches you the game quicker. It also loses you your fleet if you guess, so the first habit to build is checking the numbers before every launch.
SFC2 has a battle Calculator in the top nav, so you do not need an outside tool. It takes up to three waves, your three combat techs, both sets of coordinates, and the defender's fleet, defenses, resources and Resource Den level. Out comes the winner, the round count, plunder, debris, fuel burned, ship losses and the net. It also tells you how many recyclers the debris will need and whether your cargo can carry the plunder home. Every espionage report has a Simulate button that loads that target straight into it. The calculator is still marked beta, so if a fight looks close, run it twice.
Two numbers decide whether a raid is worth flying. Thirty percent of the ore and crystal cost of every ship destroyed on both sides turns into debris in that slot, and a winning attacker takes half of the resources sitting on the planet (fifty five percent if the two of you are at war). In the run above the debris is nearly seven times the plunder. That is normal. You are flying at fleets, not at warehouses.
Fleets
A working raid fleet is roughly two or three Artemis Class Fighters for every big ship, the big ships split between Athena Class Battleships and Hades Class Battleships, and one Dionysus Class Recycler for every three or four big ships so you can pick up your own debris. Exact ratios matter far less than people claim. What matters is that the fleet is big enough to end the fight quickly.
Athena and Hades are the two ships to build. They are the same speed, they survive well, and between them they cover both cheap resources:
| Ship | Ore | Crystal | Hydrogen | Attack | Shield | Hull | Speed | Fuel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Artemis Class Fighter | 3,000 | 1,000 | 0 | 50 | 10 | 400 | 12,500 | 20 |
| Apollo Class Fighter | 6,000 | 2,500 | 0 | 150 | 25 | 850 | 10,000 | 75 |
| Poseidon Class Cruiser | 20,000 | 7,000 | 2,000 | 400 | 50 | 2,700 | 15,000 | 300 |
| Athena Class Battleship | 45,000 | 15,000 | 0 | 1,000 | 200 | 6,000 | 10,000 | 500 |
| Hades Class Battleship | 30,000 | 40,000 | 15,000 | 700 | 400 | 7,000 | 10,000 | 250 |
| Ares Class Bomber | 50,000 | 25,000 | 15,000 | 1,000 | 500 | 7,500 | 4,000 | 1,000 |
| Prometheus Class Destroyer | 60,000 | 50,000 | 15,000 | 2,000 | 500 | 11,000 | 5,000 | 1,000 |
Athena is the best attack per resource of any big hull and it costs no hydrogen at all, so it is what you build when ore is piling up. Hades costs crystal and hydrogen instead, and it burns half the fuel of an Athena and a quarter of what the bombers burn, so it is what you build when you want to fly a lot. Build both and you spend down all three warehouses instead of stalling on one.
The Ares Class Bomber and Prometheus Class Destroyer are not bad ships. They are slow and thirsty. At speed 4,000 and 5,000 they drag the whole fleet down to their pace and each one burns 1,000 hydrogen where a Hades burns 250. Keep a block of Ares for cracking heavy defense grids, because their rapid fire against turrets is enormous, and leave them home the rest of the time.
Rapid fire and the ships nothing touches
Rapid fire is the single biggest swing in a battle. If a ship has a rating of R against its target, then after it hits, it has an (R-1)/R chance to fire again immediately, and it keeps rolling. A rating of 20 means roughly twenty shots for the price of one.
| Ship | Rapid fire against |
|---|---|
| Hades Class | Athena 7, Apollo 4, Poseidon 4, Atlas 3, Hercules 3, Carmanor 2 |
| Poseidon Class | Artemis 6, Missile Battery 10 |
| Prometheus Class | Hades 2, Laser Cannon 10 |
| Ares Class | Missile Battery 20, Laser Cannon 20, Pulse Cannon 10, Particle Cannon 10 |
| Apollo Class | Atlas 3 |
| Zeus Class | everything except Plasma Cannon, Decoy, Large Decoy, Hephaestus and other Zeus |
Read that table backwards and you get the useful half. Leaving the Zeus aside, nothing at all has rapid fire against the Prometheus, the Ares, the Dionysus, the Gaia, the Gauss Cannon, the Decoy or the Large Decoy, and nothing whatsoever, Zeus included, has rapid fire against the Plasma Cannon. The flip side is that a fleet leaning on Athena gets shredded by an enemy holding Hades, and a fleet leaning on Artemis gets shredded by an enemy holding Poseidon. Scan first and pick the hull the target cannot chew.
The one percent rule
A shot that comes in at one percent or less of the target's maximum shield does nothing at all. It does not chip the shield, it simply bounces. This almost never matters between normal ships, and it matters enormously against the two giants. A Zeus Class carries 50,000 shield, so anything under 500 attack cannot touch it. A Hephaestus Class Attack Platform carries 150,000, so anything under 1,500 attack cannot touch it. Artemis and Apollo are useless against either one no matter how many you send. Shields also refill to full at the start of every round, so a mass of weak ships never wears one down.
Fodder
Fodder is worth sending in three cases: the enemy holds high damage units that would one shot your big ships, you already expect to lose more than about five percent of your fleet value, or the enemy holds ships with rapid fire against your big hulls and you want cheap targets soaking those extra shots. Artemis is the default because it is the cheapest hull in the game at 3,000 ore and 1,000 crystal.
Apollo is only better fodder than Artemis when the target is heavy in Poseidon, because Poseidon has rapid fire 6 against Artemis and nothing against Apollo. That is a narrow case. Poseidon itself is poor fodder unless the target is stacked with Artemis and Missile Batteries, which is exactly what it eats.
Half the time the effect is small enough that leaving fodder home is worth it just to shave a few minutes off the flight, since Artemis at speed 12,500 is faster than your battleships anyway and does not slow you down. Put both versions through the Calculator and take whichever loses less.
Attacking
A battle runs at most six rounds. If both sides still have units standing when round six ends, the result is a draw: nobody plunders, and you have paid for the fuel and the losses for nothing. That makes the round count in the Calculator the number to watch. Aim for a win in three or four rounds. If you are getting five or six, send more, split the job, or find a softer target.
Targets come off the Galaxy page. Players who have not logged in for seven days carry a small i beside the name and after twenty one days it becomes a capital I. Inactive players lose newbie protection and the rank gap entirely, so anyone can hit them. The green rows are NPC encounters, colour coded by how hard the fight is for a fleet your size, and nothing protects them either. Slot 10 in that shot is a debris field left by somebody else's battle, and a recycler will take it if you get there first.
Two limits shape how you farm a live player. You may land at most six attacks on the same planet or moon in twenty four hours, and going over it is refused at launch. NPCs are exempt, and so is anyone your alliance is formally at war with. On top of that, two players can only fight if the smaller one has at least a fifth of the larger one's resources spent points, and that ceiling only lifts once both of you are above 25,000. Below 750 points nobody can be attacked at all. See Bashing and Newbie Protection.
The dispatch summary is worth reading before every launch. Distance, one way duration and the exact hydrogen bill all update as you add ships, and the speed dropdown runs from 100 percent down to 5 percent in steps of five. Slower means later and cheaper. There is no way to speed a fleet past 100 percent, so the only way to arrive sooner is to build faster ships or raise the drive tech behind them.
The fleet always travels at the speed of its slowest ship. Probes are effectively instant and never slow anything down, so if you want an attack to land later you either drop the speed percentage or add something genuinely slow like a Dionysus at 2,000 or an Ares at 4,000.
If a target has real resources on it as well as a fleet, splitting into two waves usually beats one big hit: the first wave kills the fleet, the second arrives with Hercules Class Cargo to carry the plunder. Watch the Cargo line in the Calculator. If your cargo figure is below the plunder figure, you are leaving resources on the ground.
A group attack takes up to seven fleets. Whoever starts it sets the arrival time, and anyone joining later can push that arrival back by at most thirty percent of the original flight time. If a joiner is further out than that, they cannot join and somebody else has to open the attack. Send a probe of your own before committing so you can see the real arrival time and match your ships to the fight rather than guessing.
Defense
Defenses exist because you cannot sit at the keyboard around the clock. How many you need depends on how often you are away with a fleet at home, not on how rich you are.
Two rules make defense much cheaper to keep than fleet. Seventy percent of everything destroyed on the ground is rebuilt for free when the battle ends, and defenses leave no debris at all. An attacker who burns ships punching through a grid gets nothing back for them, which is exactly why a well defended planet with nothing loose on it is a bad trade and gets left alone.
| Defense | Ore | Crystal | Hydrogen | Attack | Shield | Hull | Rapid fired by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Missile Battery | 2,000 | 0 | 0 | 80 | 20 | 200 | Ares 20, Poseidon 10 |
| Laser Cannon | 1,500 | 500 | 0 | 100 | 25 | 200 | Ares 20, Prometheus 10 |
| Pulse Cannon | 6,000 | 2,000 | 0 | 250 | 100 | 800 | Ares 10 |
| Particle Cannon | 2,000 | 6,000 | 0 | 150 | 500 | 800 | Ares 10 |
| Gauss Cannon | 20,000 | 15,000 | 2,000 | 1,100 | 200 | 3,500 | Zeus only |
| Plasma Cannon | 50,000 | 50,000 | 30,000 | 3,000 | 300 | 10,000 | nothing |
| Decoy | 10,000 | 10,000 | 0 | 0 | 2,000 | 2,000 | nothing |
| Large Decoy | 50,000 | 50,000 | 0 | 0 | 10,000 | 10,000 | nothing |
Missile Batteries and Laser Cannons give you the most damage per resource in the game, which is why they are the standard filler, but they are also what Ares Bombers are built to erase. Gauss and Plasma are the opposite: expensive per point of damage, immune to almost all rapid fire, and hitting hard enough per shot to actually kill battleships instead of scratching them. A grid of nothing but cheap turrets folds to a bomber wave. A grid with a Gauss and Plasma core behind it does not.
Decoys carry no weapon at all. They exist to eat hits, they have the shield and hull to survive them, and nothing in the game has rapid fire against them, so they are the cleanest answer to both Ares and Zeus. See Defenses.
If your alliance has bought the Repair Dock perk, ten percent per level up to six levels of your own destroyed ships come back to a dock on the planet for you to claim. It only fires when you are defending at your own planet with no allied fleets sitting on it, which is precisely the case where you got caught with the fleet home.
When you genuinely need to be away, there are two switches under Settings, Protection. Diplomacy Mode is free, takes twenty four hours to come on, and costs you 25 to 75 percent of your production depending on your size. PVE Mode is a store item that blocks player combat in both directions for a set number of days with no production hit. Neither one saves you once you have gone inactive.
Armor, Shield and Weapons Tech
Each level of Weapons Tech, Shield Tech and Armor Tech adds ten percent of a unit's base attack, shield or hull. All three double in cost every level.
Armor is the one to push first, because it costs pure ore and ore is the resource you will always have too much of. Weapons next. Shield last, because it is crystal heavy and crystal is the resource that actually runs out. Keeping them level, with shield allowed to lag by one, is a fine rule.
The thing most players get wrong is stopping too early. Because each level adds ten percent of base rather than ten percent of current, going from 10 to 11 is a five percent lift on what you already have, and going from 20 to 21 is a three percent lift. As a rough test, if the next level costs less than about three to five percent of what your ships and defenses are worth, take it. Weapons Tech has a second job as well: it is what pushes a ship's attack over the one percent shield floor described above, so it is the only way lighter hulls ever learn to hurt a Zeus.
Drives are separate and easy to forget. Jet Drive adds ten percent speed per level to Artemis, Hercules, Dionysus, Zagreus, Carmanor and probes. Pulse Drive adds twenty percent per level to Apollo, Poseidon and Gaia. Warp Drive adds thirty percent per level to Athena, Hades, Prometheus, Zeus and the Hephaestus. Two ships switch engines as you tech up: the Atlas moves from Jet to Pulse at Pulse Drive 5, which doubles its speed and doubles its fuel, and the Ares moves from Pulse to Warp at Warp Drive 8, which raises its speed by a quarter at no extra fuel.
Resources and mines
Do not chase a fixed ore to crystal to hydrogen ratio. Build whatever is currently stopping you. The game publishes its own price list at the Merchant, which trades at one ore to 1.5 crystal to 2.5 hydrogen for 5,000 credits a trade, and that is a decent guide to what a resource is worth.
Mines get worse the higher you push them, and they get worse at very different rates. Valuing output at the Merchant's rates, an Ore Mine upgrade around level 20 pays for itself in about a week and one around level 25 takes about a month. The same upgrades on a Crystal Mine take about three weeks and about four months. The Hydrogen Synthesizer sits in between. That gap is why ore piles up while crystal and hydrogen are the things you are always short of.
Cold planets produce more hydrogen, so an outer slot colony is worth more than its field count suggests. Both mines and warehouses matter: once a resource hits its warehouse cap the mine simply stops adding to it, so a full warehouse is wasted production as well as bait. See Mines.
Past the first month or two most of your income stops coming from mines. Debris from your own kills is the biggest line, plunder is second, production is third. That is the real argument for raiding. A Dionysus can pay for itself in a single harvest run, and no mine level ever will.
Missions are not the trap the old guide said they were. They cost a fleet slot, they never lose you a ship, and every level of Expedition Tech adds thirty percent to what all of them pay. The long ones at the bottom of the list want a Zeus and blocks of Hades and Prometheus and pay out in the hundreds of thousands before that bonus is applied. Send whatever is sitting idle. Just do not plan your day around it. Once a planet has a Capitol you also unlock Secret Missions, which build an NPC base scaled to your current strength, one at a time.
Espionage
Every scan produces an espionage number, and that number decides how much of the report you get to read. Take the difference between your espionage points and theirs. If you are equal or ahead, the number is your probe count plus the difference squared. If you are behind, it is your probe count minus the difference squared, floored at zero.
| Espionage number | What the report shows |
|---|---|
| 0 | Resources only |
| 2 | Resources and fleet |
| 3 | Resources, fleet and defenses |
| 5 | Adds buildings |
| 7 | Adds technologies |
At equal Espionage Tech that means three probes buy you the defenses, five buy the buildings and seven buy the techs. One level ahead and the same results cost two, four and six. Two levels ahead and a single probe already shows you the buildings, while three shows you everything. Being two levels ahead of the people around you is worth far more than sending more probes.
The report also prints your Counterespionage Chance, which is the chance the probes were shot down. It is a factor from the tech difference multiplied by the cube root of your probe count and the cube root of the number of ships defending. If the defender is two or more levels below you, the factor is zero and your probes can never be caught. If nothing is in orbit, it is also zero. Everywhere in between, that percentage is a readable clue: with your own probe count and tech known, it tells you roughly how many ships are sitting on that planet even when the fleet section is blacked out.
Note that the Resources block shows what you can actually take, after the target's Resource Den has been subtracted, not the raw pile. The buttons under a report launch an attack, another scan, a harvest, or a Calculator run against exactly that target, so you never have to retype anything.
Scanning a bigger player draws attention you may not want. Scanning one who has already scanned or attacked you costs nothing extra, and knowing what kind of fleet they fly decides whether you fight, hide or hand the coordinates to someone larger.
Catching opponents and not getting caught
The activity marker beside a planet name is the whole game of timing. A green (*) means somebody was on that planet within the last fifteen minutes. After that it turns into a minute count and simply disappears after an hour. It is written at most once every five minutes, and it belongs to the planet, not the player, so somebody working out of a colony shows nothing at all on their homeworld. Players in Vacation Mode show nothing anywhere.
The same fact is your best defence. SFC2 puts you back on whichever planet you were last using, so if you expect trouble, work out of a quiet colony and let the planet they are watching sit dark.
Do not attack or scan someone who is clearly awake unless you have a reason. It wastes the flight and it warns them. The exceptions are worth knowing: a target sitting on far more hydrogen than their cargo ships can lift is not going anywhere fast, and a scan you want them to see is a cheap way to make somebody move along.
For your own fleet the rule is short. Ships in the air cannot be touched, because an attack can only be aimed at a planet or a moon. Fleets has a Fleet Save mission that sends everything out and turns it straight around, and the Duration it shows is one way, so a five hour save is ten hours there and back. Load it with every resource the hold will carry. See Fleet / Resource Saving.
Two things do not work the way they did in the old game. An attack mission carries no cargo in SFC2, so raiding an empty inactive is not a way to move resources around, and there is no hold or station mission, so a save is always a round trip. If you catch an incoming attack early, recall from the Fleets page, but know what a recall actually costs: the fleet takes exactly as long to get home as it has already been flying, so calling it back ten minutes before it lands still leaves it in the air for however long it has been out.
When somebody probes you, the sensible move is to send most of the fleet out and leave a small, plausible force behind with the resources. If they commit to that, you have cost them a flight for very little. What you must not do is leave the whole fleet home hoping the attack was a bluff. The upside of a raid is measured in hundreds of thousands. Losing a fleet is measured in tens of millions.
Buildings
Building time on a planet is divided by one plus the Capitol level, so a Capitol 5 builds six times as fast. All five levels together cost about 12,400 ore, 3,700 crystal and 6,200 hydrogen, which is nothing. Put one on every planet you intend to keep.
Ship and defense time is divided by the Shipyard level plus one, so a Shipyard 8 on a colony is what turns that colony from a mining outpost into somewhere you can actually spend its own resources.
The Foundry halves both building time and ship time for every level. It needs Capitol 10 and A.I. Tech 10 and the first level alone costs two million ore, so it is a late purchase and normally only on the homeworld. Two things to know before you start one: you cannot upgrade a Foundry while ships or defenses are building on that planet, and you cannot start ships or defenses while the Foundry is upgrading. Plan the downtime.
Only one building or mine upgrade runs at a time on a planet, and only one research runs at a time across the whole account. Research comes out of the Research Lab on whichever planet you have selected, so before ARCNet you keep one good lab and always start from there. Once ARCNet is up, the best (1 + ARCNet level) labs that meet the tech's own lab requirement are added together, and the planet you start from stops mattering.
Colonization
You can hold ten planets. Moons do not count against that, so a full account is ten planets plus whatever moons you have made. Slot position decides temperature and roughly how many fields a planet gets: slots 4 through 9 are the roomiest, the inner slots are hot and cramped, the outer slots are cold, smaller and better at hydrogen.
Colonies clustered around your homeworld are convenient and they are also a signpost. Anyone who scans one has found the rest, and your sleeping pattern with them. It is not a reason to avoid it, but if you do cluster, be honest that you have traded quiet for logistics.
The one thing worth planning around is keeping a slot spare. A colony dropped next to whoever you are farming turns a two hour round trip into fifteen minutes, gives you somewhere to save the fleet locally, and moves on with you when the area is picked clean. Two of them means you can be set up in the next area before you leave the last. If you would rather not spend a slot, the Move Planet option in the store relocates an existing colony for 250,000 credits plus another 250,000 per galaxy of distance, on a twenty four hour cooldown.
Alliance
Alliance size does not matter. What matters is how many of them live within a galaxy or two of you and how big their fleets are. A hundred members on the far side of the universe will not answer an attack in time. Four people in your neighbourhood with real fleets will.
SFC2 has no formal non aggression treaty system, so a NAP is whatever the two groups agreed in writing on a forum. Wars are formal. An alliance declares on another, and while it runs the plunder share rises from fifty to fifty five percent, destroyed ship points count double, and the six attack limit does not apply between players on opposite sides. Going to war with your neighbours is a decision about how much you want to fly, not a formality.
Alliance perks are bought with alliance points and several of them matter to a raider. Repair Dock returns part of your defensive ship losses. Research Relay speeds every member's research. Lunar Dockyard speeds moon building. Gate Cargo Manifest lets fleets carry resources through a Warp Gate, and Gate Phase Sync keeps gates usable while they upgrade. If you are choosing an alliance and two are otherwise equal, look at what they have already bought.
Zeus, Hephaestus, Oracle and Warp Gate
The Zeus Class costs 5,000,000 ore, 4,000,000 crystal and 1,000,000 hydrogen and needs a Shipyard 12 plus seven techs. It carries 200,000 attack, 50,000 shield and 900,000 hull, and it has rapid fire against everything except Plasma Cannons, Decoys, the Hephaestus and other Zeus. It can leave the planet, but at speed 100 it is not going far, so in practice it is a home defender and a tool for flattening the defenses of an inactive who cannot shoot back. Against the fleets that can actually hurt it, remember the one percent rule: only ships from Poseidon upward can damage a Zeus at all.
The Hephaestus Class Attack Platform costs 20,000,000 ore, 20,000,000 crystal and 10,000,000 hydrogen and needs a Shipyard 13 and a Foundry 3. It has no weapon. What it has is 150,000 shield, four million hull and a billion cargo, and you deploy it into an empty slot from the Galaxy page as a forward base. The old version of this guide asked whether you could move it under attack, and the answer is yes: as long as it has no fleets of its own in the air you can move it to another empty slot, and a platform in transit cannot be attacked or scanned. That is its fleet save. It cannot launch anything while it is moving either, so the trade is real. Docking it back into a ship needs a moon with a Lunar Dock.
The Oracle is the best value of the four and it is the one that changed most from the old game. It is a moon building, it sweeps five solar systems each way per level, and each scan costs a flat 5,000 hydrogen taken from that moon. A scan answers one question at a time: encounters, inactive players, or active players, with an option to hide alliance mates and buddies. What comes back is coordinates, name and a difficulty band with a number, and every row has a button that fires probes at it from that moon. It does not show fleets in flight. It is a target finder, not an early warning system, and at level 5 it hands you every soft target in fifty systems for the price of one Dionysus trip.
The Warp Gate is a moon building at both ends. A jump takes five seconds and burns no fuel at all, which is the entire point. Both moons then go on cooldown, sized by each gate's own level: one hour at level 1, dropping about fifteen percent per level after that, so a level 5 gate is back in half an hour. By default a jump carries no resources, only ships, unless your alliance owns Gate Cargo Manifest.
All three of the moon buildings need a moon first, and moons come from battles. When a fight at a planet creates debris, the game rolls once against that battle's ore plus crystal debris divided by 15,000,000, capped at twenty percent. Below one percent it does not roll at all, so you need at least 150,000 debris in a single battle for any chance. Hitting the twenty percent cap needs 3,000,000 debris in one battle, which means about 10,000,000 of ore and crystal in destroyed ships, or roughly 2,500 Artemis. Only battles at planets roll, and a slot that already has a moon never rolls again.
Based on the original Starfleet Commander guide by EvilPenguin, rewritten for SFC2.
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