Apollo Platoon

The Apollo Platoon is a starter plan for players who want to raid. It takes a fresh homeworld to a fleet of eight Apollo Class Fighters, four Atlas Class Cargo and six Hermes Class Probes, and the whole list costs about 132,000 resources.

A new SFC2 account already starts with Capitol 2, Shipyard 3, Research Lab 1, Energy Tech 3, Jet Drive 3, two Artemis, two Hermes and one Atlas. The list below is only what you still have to buy on top of that.

Build/Research List

Name	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	Points	Unlocks
Research Lab 2	400	800	400	1.6	Armor, Pulse
Research Lab 3	800	1,600	800	3.2	Espionage
Espionage Tech 1	200	1,000	200	1.4
Espionage Tech 2	400	2,000	400	2.8	Hermes
Espionage Tech 3	800	4,000	800	5.6
A.I. Tech 1	0	400	600	1.0	2nd fleet
A.I. Tech 2	0	800	1,200	2.0	3rd fleet
A.I. Tech 3	0	1,600	2,400	4.0	4th fleet
Pulse Drive 1	2,000	4,000	600	6.6
Pulse Drive 2	4,000	8,000	1,200	13.2	Apollo
Armor Tech 1	1,000	0	0	1.0
Armor Tech 2	2,000	0	0	2.0	Apollo
Armor Tech 3	4,000	0	0	4.0
Hermes x4	0	4,000	0	4.0
Atlas x3	6,000	6,000	0	12.0
Apollo x8	48,000	20,000	0	68.0
Total	69,600	54,200	8,600	132.4

Points are Resources Spent points, the number the Leaders board ranks you on. One point is 1,000 resources put into buildings, mines, research, ships or defenses.

Notes on the order:

Research Lab 3 is the gate on Espionage Tech, so it comes first even though nothing else on the list needs it.
You can only run one research at a time on the whole account, and research stops completely while a Research Lab is upgrading. Get the lab levels out of the way first.
The Atlas only needs Jet Drive 2 and Shipyard 2, and you start above both, so you can build cargo from day one.
The Apollo needs Pulse Drive 2, Armor Tech 2 and Shipyard 3. Pulse Drive 2 is the most expensive single line here at 13.2 points.
Each level of A.I. Tech adds a fleet slot. You start with one slot, so A.I. Tech 3 puts four fleets in the air at once.
Ships and defenses share one build queue per planet, so eight Apollos is one long queue, not eight parallel ones.

Apollo Raiding

This is a good way to start if you want to play as a raider. It is a long list, so here it is in parts.

Espionage

Do not attack blind. Send probes first and read the report. Espionage Tech 2 unlocks the Hermes, but Espionage 3 is worth the extra 5.6 points because the report detail depends on the gap between your Espionage Tech and theirs.

The espionage number is your probe count plus the square of the tech difference. If you are ahead the square is added, if you are behind it is subtracted. Six probes at Espionage 3 against someone at Espionage 4 gives 6 - 1 = 5. Against someone at Espionage 1 it gives 6 + 4 = 10.

Espionage number	What the report shows
0	Resources
2	Fleet
3	Defenses
5	Buildings
7	Technologies

The resource line is what you could actually plunder, after any Resource Den the target has. Probes can be shot down on the way in, but only if the target has ships sitting on the planet. An empty planet has no counterespionage at all, which is why the report above reads 0.0 percent.

Every report ends with Attack, Espionage, Harvest and Simulate buttons. Simulate opens the Calculator (under More in the top nav) with the defender already filled in from the report.

Raiding Inactives

While the Apollos are building, go shopping. Open the Galaxy page and read the Status column of the nearby systems.

Mark	Meaning
i	No login for 7 days
I	No login for 21 days
n	Newbie protection, or the two of you are too far apart in rank
P	PVE Mode, cannot be attacked by players at all

The i and I players are the ones to hit. An inactive player has no protection of any kind, so you can raid them even while you are still a newbie yourself. Plenty of accounts sign up, build nothing, and go quiet with a lone Atlas parked on the planet and a full warehouse.

Two things to watch:

Cargo ships cannot fight. An Atlas hits for 5, and a battle stops after six rounds, so four Atlas will not kill even one parked Atlas. Send cargo on its own only when the report shows an empty planet. Anything with a ship or a turret on it needs Apollos.
You can only land six attacks on the same planet in 24 hours. That limit does not apply to NPC encounters or to an alliance you are at war with.

A win plunders 50 percent of what is on the planet, and your fleet can only carry what its surviving cargo holds. An Atlas carries 5,000 and an Apollo carries 100, so the full platoon lifts 20,800 at most. Attack fleets cannot load resources before they leave, so the only way to haul more is to bring more hulls.

The green rows in the Galaxy list are NPC encounters. They are always attackable, and the colored number rates them against your own strength: gray trivial, blue easy, amber challenging, red dangerous. Twelve ships is a small fleet, so most encounters will read red for a while. Leave those alone.

Raiding Actives

Active players are a different problem, because of newbie protection. Below 750 Resources Spent points nobody can attack you and you cannot attack anyone who is playing. This whole list only comes to 132 points, and a finished platoon with a few mine levels behind it sits near 210, so the platoon by itself never takes you out of protection. Your mines and buildings are what eventually push you past 750.

Once both of you are over 750, you can attack anyone within a factor of five of your points, either way, until the smaller of the two is over 25,000 points. After that the rank gap stops mattering.

Most active players at that size have a couple of fighters and a thin wall of turrets, because they spend everything on mines. That is what the Apollos are for. Runs through the in-game Calculator with Armor Tech 3 and nothing else researched:

Defending planet	Result for 8 Apollo + 4 Atlas
8 Artemis	Clean win, nothing lost
12 Missile Batteries	Win every time, usually nothing lost
12 Laser Cannons	Win every time, an Atlas or two lost
24 mixed turrets	Loses more often than it wins
25 Missile Batteries	Loses about four times in five
30 Missile Batteries	Loses every time

So about twenty turrets is the ceiling for this fleet. Check the number in the spy report and run it through the Calculator before you launch.

Two rules make repeat raids on a defended planet a bad idea. About 70 percent of the turrets you kill are rebuilt for free right after the battle, and defenses leave no debris at all, so you cannot grind a wall down and you get nothing back for the ships you lose doing it. Ships leave 30 percent of their build cost as debris, which is the only salvage on the field.

A.I. Tech 3 gives you four fleets, and the temptation is to split the platoon into four groups of one Atlas and two Apollos. That works on empty planets and on a lone Artemis, but it fails badly against turrets. Split up for undefended targets, go in together for anything else.

Wiping Out

Points in SFC2 are a live count of what you own, not of what you have ever spent. If the whole fleet dies you lose about 90 points of ships and drop straight back down the board. That is annoying but it is not fatal, and while you are under 750 points nobody can come after you at home while you rebuild.

If it does happen, the Atlas ships are the cheapest thing to replace and the Apollos are the slow part. Rebuild the cargo first, go back to inactive planets for a while, and read what to do when under attack before you park a new fleet on your planet overnight.