Artemis Class Fighter

The Artemis Class Fighter is the cheapest armed ship in SFC2 and the first one almost everybody builds. You start the game with two of them parked on your homeworld.

One Artemis on its own is nothing. Fifty attack, ten shield and four hundred hull will not win you anything. What the Artemis is for is numbers. Nothing in the game buys as much hull per resource spent, and in a battle every hull you own soaks shots that would otherwise be landing on your expensive ships. That is the whole job.

Building one

Artemis are built on the Shipyard page. The listed requirements are Shipyard 1 and Jet Drive 1, and you already have both the moment you sign up. Every new commander starts with Capitol 2, Shipyard 3, Research Lab 1, Energy Tech 3 and Jet Drive 3, so there is nothing to unlock first. You can queue Artemis in your first minute in the game.

The Base column is the ship as designed. The Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons Tech adds 10 percent of the base attack per level, Shield Tech does the same for shield, Armor Tech for hull and Jet Drive for speed. The commander above is running Weapons 9, Shield 8, Armor 11 and Jet Drive 12, which turns 50 / 10 / 400 / 12,500 into 95 / 18 / 840 / 27,500.

An Artemis is 40 build points, so on a bare Shipyard 1 with no Foundry each one takes 24 minutes. Every Shipyard level cuts that down and every Foundry level halves it again. The Shipyard 9 and Foundry 4 planet in the shot above turns one out every 18 seconds.

Every Artemis that dies leaves 900 ore and 300 crystal in the debris field, the flat 30 percent of build cost that every ship leaves behind.

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 More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

The Artemis rapid fires	Rating
Helios Class Solar Satellite	x5
Genesis Solar Satellite	x5
Hermes Class Probe	x5
Shadow Probe	x5

Rapid fires the Artemis	Rating
Zeus Class	x200
Poseidon Class Cruiser	x6

The first list is worth almost nothing in a real fight. Probes and satellites die to anything and nobody parks them in front of a fleet on purpose. The second list is the one that decides how you use the ship. A Poseidon Class Cruiser averages six shots a round at Artemis instead of one, and a Zeus Class gets two hundred. Everything else in the game shoots an Artemis once and moves on, which is exactly what you want from fodder.

What an Artemis cannot hurt

A shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all. An Artemis hits for 50 before research, so anything with a shield rating of 5,000 or more shrugs it off completely. Three things in the game are over that line: the Zeus Class at 50,000, the Hephaestus Class Attack Platform at 150,000 and the Large Decoy at 10,000. Weapons Tech lifts your attack and Shield Tech lifts their shield by the same 10 percent a level, so at matched research this never changes.

Throw 50,000 Artemis at a single Zeus and the battle runs the full six rounds, the Zeus takes zero damage and about 2,500 Artemis die for nothing. The plain Decoy is the other way round. Its 2,000 shield sits under the line, so 20,000 Artemis wipe out a screen of twenty Decoys in the first round without losing a ship.

Using them as fodder

Every unit in a battle picks its target at random from everything the other side has on the field. It does not aim for the valuable ships. So the cheaper your average unit is, the more enemy shots get wasted on something that cost you almost nothing.

Counting crystal at 1.67 ore and hydrogen at 2.5 ore, one Artemis costs about 4,670. That is 214 hulls for every million resources you spend, more than any other armed ship in the game. The same million spent on Athena Class Battleships buys 14 hulls.

Here is what that is worth. Both of these fleets cost the same 50 million, and both are hitting 300 Hades Class Battleships with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides.

Attacking fleet	Result
714 Athena, no screen	Attacker loses. All 714 Athena die, 42.8 million gone, and one Hades is still standing.
500 Athena and 3,214 Artemis	Attacker wins in 4 rounds. About 650 Artemis die and not a single Athena. 2.6 million gone.

Same money, same target, and the screen turns a total loss into a clean win at a sixteenth of the cost. That is why nearly every attack fleet in the game has a pile of Artemis sitting in front of it.

When the screen backfires

Rapid fire breaks all of that. Point the same 50 million at 1,000 Poseidon instead and the Artemis screen makes things worse rather than better.

Attacking fleet	Result against 1,000 Poseidon
714 Athena, no screen	Win in 5 rounds, about 40 Athena lost, 2.4 million
500 Athena and 3,214 Artemis	Win in 6 rounds, about 3,150 Artemis and 40 Athena lost, 15 million
500 Athena and 1,475 Apollo	Win in 5 rounds, about 860 Apollo lost, 7.3 million

The Poseidon is firing six times a round into the screen instead of once, so the Artemis soak up nothing and just hand the defender free kills. Against a Poseidon fleet you want Apollo Class Fighters in front instead. Nothing has rapid fire on the Apollo except the Hades and the Zeus.

The Zeus is worse again at 200. If the target has a Zeus on it, leave the Artemis at home.

Head to head at equal cost

10,000 Artemis cost about 46.7 million. These are Calculator runs against stacks that cost the same, again with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides.

10,000 Artemis against	Result
4,590 Apollo	Draw on the six round limit, 9,900 Artemis lost against 1,610 Apollo
1,273 Poseidon	Artemis lose. All 10,000 die and take about 15 Poseidon with them
667 Athena	Draw on the six round limit, 3,300 Artemis lost against 540 Athena
361 Ares	Artemis win in 6 rounds, about 1,460 lost
348 Hades	Artemis win in 5 rounds, about 1,200 lost
258 Prometheus	Artemis win in 5 rounds, about 980 lost

The pattern is simple. Artemis beat the big expensive hulls on price, because a Hades or a Prometheus can only kill one thing at a time no matter how hard it hits, and 10,000 Artemis get a lot of shots in. They lose badly to anything cheap that hits hard, and they lose worst of all to rapid fire.

Evaluation

Advantages

Cheap, fast to build and the best hull per resource in the game. They also carry 50 cargo each, so a big Artemis screen brings a useful amount of loot home on its own without you having to add cargo ships.

They are cheap to fly. 20 hydrogen against 75 for an Apollo and 300 for a Poseidon, and only 2 hydrogen an hour each to hold on a group defend. You can park a wall of Artemis on an ally's planet for a day and barely notice the bill.

They fire back. Fodder that shoots is still fodder, but 3,000 Artemis put 3,000 shots a round into the other side, and against defences and small hulls that adds up fast.

Disadvantages

The weapons rating is 50. Against a Zeus, a Hephaestus or a Large Decoy that is literally zero damage, and against anything well shielded you need a lot of Artemis before the shots start getting through at all.

The Poseidon and the Zeus both rapid fire them, and either one turns your screen into free points for the other side.

The Artemis is stuck on Jet Drive forever, which is 10 percent speed a level. Everything you would fly it with moves up to Pulse Drive at 20 percent a level or Warp Drive at 30. The 12,500 base speed looks great when you start, but a fleet moves at the speed of its slowest ship, so if you stop putting levels into Jet Drive the Artemis end up holding everything else back.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Research Lab 1
Energy Tech 1
Shipyard 1
Jet Drive 1
Artemis Class Fighter