Ares Class Bomber

The Ares Class Bomber is a siege ship. It is built to knock down planetary defenses, and it is the only normal ship in the game with real rapid fire against turrets. Everything else about it is a compromise. It is the slowest warship you can build, it burns as much hydrogen a trip as anything short of a Hephaestus, and it has no rapid fire at all against combat ships.

Build them when you need to break a defended planet. Do not build them as your main fleet.

Building one

Ares are built on the Shipyard page. You need Shipyard level 8, Plasma Tech 5 and Pulse Drive 6. Plasma Tech is the long pole. It sits behind Research Lab 4, Energy Tech 8, Laser Tech 10 and Particle Tech 5, so most commanders have been playing a while before their first Ares rolls out.

The Base column is the ship as designed. The Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons Tech adds 10 percent to attack per level, Shield Tech adds 10 percent to shield and Armor Tech adds 10 percent to hull. The commander above is running Weapons 9, Shield 8 and Armor 11, which turns 1,000 / 500 / 7,500 into 1,900 / 900 / 15,750. The speed jump from 4,000 to 17,000 is the engine swap, covered further down.

Every Ares that dies leaves 15,000 ore and 7,500 crystal in the debris field, the flat 30 percent of build cost that every ship leaves behind. Hydrogen never turns into debris, so the 15,000 hydrogen in each one is gone for good the moment it dies.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire gives a ship a chance at another shot in the same round every time it hits a unit it has rapid fire against. The chance is (rating minus 1) divided by rating, so a rating of 20 is 95 percent, a rating of 10 is 90 percent and a rating of 5 is 80 percent. One Ares shooting Missile Batteries keeps firing until it rolls a 1 in 20, which is why a small stack of them can flatten a wall of turrets in a single round.

The More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

The Ares rapid fires	Rating
Laser Cannon	x20
Missile Battery	x20
Particle Cannon	x10
Pulse Cannon	x10
Genesis Solar Satellite	x5
Helios Class Solar Satellite	x5
Hermes Class Probe	x5
Shadow Probe	x5

Rapid fires the Ares	Rating
Zeus Class	x25

Two things stand out. The four turrets on the first list are the four cheap ones every player spams, so the Ares is aimed squarely at the defenses you actually run into. It has nothing against the Gauss Cannon or the Plasma Cannon, and nothing at all against combat ships.

The other is how short the second list is. Only the Zeus Class rapid fires the Ares, and nobody brings a Zeus to a normal fight. The Hades, which tears through Apollos at x4 and Athenas at x7, has nothing against an Ares.

Cracking defenses

This is what the ship is for. Here is a defense stack you might meet halfway through a universe: 500 Missile Batteries, 400 Laser Cannons, 200 Pulse Cannons, 150 Particle Cannons, 60 Gauss Cannons, 20 Plasma Cannons, 5 Large Decoys and 5 Decoys. That is 1,340 units.

These are Calculator runs with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides. Every attacking stack costs the same as 200 Ares, counting crystal at 1.67 ore and hydrogen at 2.5 ore.

Attacker	Result
200 Ares	clears the stack in 5 rounds, loses 40
2,540 Apollo	clears it in 5 to 6 rounds, loses about 400
704 Poseidon	runs out of rounds with 6 turrets left, loses 271
5,535 Artemis	runs out of rounds with 5 turrets left, loses 954
369 Athena	runs out of rounds with 89 turrets left, loses 163
143 Prometheus	runs out of rounds with 650 turrets left, loses 140
192 Hades	dies to the last ship and kills under half the stack

A battle stops after six rounds. If you have not cleared the planet by then the surviving defenses stay, they shoot at you the whole way, and you come home with nothing. The Ares is the only entry on that list that finishes with room to spare, and it does it with 200 ships instead of thousands. Send 500 and it is over in three rounds for 16 losses.

Look at the debris line. The 47 Ares that died left 705,000 ore and 352,500 crystal. The 1,340 destroyed turrets left nothing, because defenses never leave debris. On top of that, about 70 percent of destroyed defenses are rebuilt for free after every battle, so the wall you just flattened is mostly back before you can hit it again. Breaking defenses is how you get at a planet's resources. It does not pay for itself.

Ares also carry very little. 200 of them hold 100,000 resources between them, so bring Hercules or Atlas cargo along if you want the plunder, and recyclers if you want your own debris back.

They are not magic against every wall either. Against a stack built around Gauss and Plasma Cannons, where the rapid fire does nothing, the Ares loses its edge and plain firepower wins. Against 2,280 units with 200 Plasma and 400 Gauss in the mix, 12,700 Apollos cleared it in five rounds while the same money in Ares ran out of rounds with turrets still standing.

What it is bad at

Fleet against fleet, the Ares is one of the worst ships you can bring. It has no rapid fire against anything that shoots back, and it is poor value for firepower. Counting crystal at 1.67 ore and hydrogen at 2.5 ore, one Ares costs about 129,000 and buys 1,000 attack. An Apollo costs about 10,200 and buys 150. That is a little over half the firepower per resource spent.

Same Calculator settings, same spend on both sides:

200 Ares against	Result
369 Athena	every Ares dies, 61 Athena die
2,540 Apollo	every Ares dies, 577 Apollo die
143 Prometheus	198 Ares die, 54 Prometheus die
704 Poseidon	draw, 180 Ares die, 385 Poseidon die
192 Hades	draw, 21 Ares die, 186 Hades die

The Hades line is the one exception. Hades are expensive and their rapid fire is pointed at Apollos and Athenas, neither of which an Ares is, so an Ares wall soaks them well. Everything else on that list beats the Ares badly. If you are sending Ares at a planet that might have a fleet sitting on it, bring combat ships of your own.

Speed and the engine swap

The Ares starts on Pulse Drive with a base speed of 4,000, the slowest of any warship. Pulse Drive adds 20 percent of that base per level.

Research Warp Drive level 8 and the ship swaps engines. The base rises to 5,000 and Warp Drive's 30 percent per level takes over, so at Warp Drive 8 the Ares flies at 5,000 plus 5,000 x 8 x 0.30, which is 17,000. That is the number in the screenshot above. The same commander on Pulse Drive 8 with no Warp Drive was doing 10,400.

After the swap an Ares moves at exactly the same speed as a Prometheus, so a bomber and destroyer fleet flies at full pace. It is still exactly half the speed of an Athena or a Hades, which run Warp Drive off a 10,000 base, so dropping Ares into a battleship fleet halves how fast that fleet gets anywhere.

Flight times below are one way at 100 percent speed. The hydrogen column is what one Ares burns for the whole trip out and back.

Distance	Pulse 6 8,800	Pulse 9 11,200	Warp 8 17,000	Warp 11 21,500	Hydrogen
Same system, 1 slot away	31:16	27:43	22:31	20:02	115
Same system, 10 slots away	31:57	28:20	23:01	20:28	120
1 system away	52:04	46:10	37:29	33:21	320
5 systems away	55:30	49:12	39:57	35:32	363
10 systems away	59:30	52:45	42:50	38:06	418
25 systems away	1:10:08	1:02:11	50:29	44:54	580
50 systems away	1:24:57	1:15:19	1:01:09	54:23	852
1 galaxy away	2:19:08	2:03:21	1:40:08	1:29:03	2,286

Fuel is charged once when the fleet leaves and covers the trip out and back. Those numbers are for a fleet of nothing but Ares. Anything slower in the fleet drags the whole thing down to its speed, which changes the times and the fuel.

Fuel and holding position

An Ares burns 1,000 hydrogen per trip before distance is applied, tied with the Prometheus and the Gaia Class Colony Ship for the most of any normal ship. An Apollo burns 75. Sending 200 Ares one galaxy over costs 457,200 hydrogen before you have fired a shot.

They are expensive to park too. Holding one on a group defend costs 100 hydrogen an hour, again the highest of any normal ship. Two hundred of them hovering over a friend's planet burn 20,000 hydrogen an hour.

Big targets

A shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all. An Ares hits for 1,000 before research, which is over the line against a Zeus Class and its 50,000 shield. That makes the Ares one of only four ships that can hurt a Zeus at base research, along with the Athena, the Hades and the Prometheus. Apollos, Artemis and Poseidons all bounce off it. 20,000 Ares kill a Zeus in the first round and lose about ten doing it, although the Zeus rapid fires the Ares at 25, so it gets a fresh shot 96 percent of the time.

The Hephaestus Class Attack Platform is a different story. At 150,000 shield an Ares has to hit for more than 1,500 to do anything, and the owner's Shield Tech pushes that bar up as fast as your Weapons Tech pushes your attack. Unless your weapons research is well ahead of theirs, Ares do nothing to a Hephaestus at all. Twenty thousand of them can sit there for all six rounds without scratching it.

Requirements

Research Lab 4
Energy Tech 8
Laser Tech 10
Particle Tech 5
Capitol 2
Shipyard 8
Plasma Tech 5
Pulse Drive 6
Ares Class Bomber