Artemis Zerglings

The Artemis Zerglings is a starter raiding plan built on the cheapest fighter in the game. Instead of a small squad of Apollos you fly a swarm: twenty four Artemis Class Fighters, four Atlas Class Cargo and six Hermes Class Probes.

It costs about the same as the Apollo Platoon, but it needs less crystal and a lot less research, and the fighters are already unlocked on a brand new account.

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

Build and Research List

Name	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	Points	Unlocks
Research Lab 2	400	800	400	1.6	Armor
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
Armor Tech 1	1,000	0	0	1.0
Armor Tech 2	2,000	0	0	2.0
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
Artemis x22	66,000	22,000	0	88.0
Total	81,600	44,200	6,800	132.6

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 2 unlocks Armor Tech and Research Lab 3 unlocks Espionage Tech, so both lab levels come first.
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 before you start anything else.
The Artemis and the Atlas are unlocked from day one, so keep the shipyard busy while the research runs. Twenty two Artemis at Shipyard 3 is about four and a half hours of queue.
The Hermes needs Espionage Tech 2, so the extra probes come after the lab levels.
Each level of A.I. Tech adds a fleet slot. You start with one, so A.I. Tech 3 puts four fleets in the air at once.
Ships and defenses share one build queue per planet, so the Artemis run is one long queue, not twenty two parallel ones.
Armor Tech is the best value on the list. Seven points of research adds 30 percent to every hull you own, and the battle table further down shows what that is worth.

Artemis Raiding

The plan is simple. Spy first, pick soft targets, and send the whole swarm at anything with a turret on it.

Espionage

Do not attack blind. Send probes and read the report before you send anything that can die.

Espionage Tech 2 is what unlocks the Hermes, but level 3 is worth the extra 5.6 points for two reasons.

First, how much the report shows depends on your espionage number: your probe count plus the square of the tech difference, added if you are ahead and subtracted if you are behind. Six probes at Espionage 3 against someone at Espionage 1 gives 6 + 4 = 10, which is a full report.

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

Second, probes can be shot down on the way in, but only when the target has ships parked on the planet and only when their Espionage Tech is within one level of yours. Two levels of lead and the chance is zero. That is why the report below reads 0.0 percent even though there are six ships sitting on that planet.

The resource line is what is actually on the planet right now. A win takes half of it, and only as much as your surviving cargo can carry home.

Every report ends with Attack, Espionage, Harvest and Simulate buttons. Simulate opens the Calculator with the defender already filled in from the report.

Raiding Inactives

While the Artemis queue runs, go shopping. Open the Galaxy page and read the Status column of the systems around you.

Mark	Meaning
i	No login for 7 days
I	No login for 21 days
n	Newbie protection, or too weak to attack
N	Too strong to attack
P	PVE Mode, cannot be attacked by players at all

The i and I players are your targets while you are new. An inactive player loses every kind of protection, so you can raid them even while you are still a newbie yourself. Everyone else is off limits until you are out of newbie protection, and that includes spying: under 750 Resources Spent points the game will not even let you send probes at a player who is still logging in.

Three 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.
Not every quiet account is an empty one. The report above is a player who stopped logging in with 12 Missile Batteries, 8 Laser Cannons and six ships still on the ground. Read the report, do not assume.
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 Artemis carries 50, so the full swarm lifts 21,200 at most. Attack fleets cannot load resources before they leave, so the only way to haul more is to bring more Atlas.

The green rows in the Galaxy list are NPC encounters. They are always attackable, and the colored number next to them rates them against your own strength. Twenty eight ships is a small fleet, so most of them will read red for a while. Leave those alone.

Raiding Actives

Once you are over 750 Resources Spent points 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 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 swarm is for. What the Artemis lacks in punch it makes up in bodies: twenty four of them carry 9,600 hull between them, more than eight Apollos do, and every one of them fires every round.

Runs through the in-game Calculator with Armor Tech 3 and nothing else researched:

Defending planet	Result for 24 Artemis + 4 Atlas
Nothing on the planet	Clean win, nothing lost
8 Artemis parked	Clean win, nothing lost
12 Missile Batteries	Win, about 1 Artemis lost
12 Laser Cannons	Win, about 3 Artemis lost
20 Missile Batteries	Win, about 5 Artemis lost
12 Missile Batteries + 8 Laser Cannons	Win, about 9 Artemis lost
25 Missile Batteries	Wins about 8 times in 10, about 12 Artemis lost
12 Missile Batteries + 12 Laser Cannons	Wins about half the time
30 Missile Batteries	Loses every time
12 Missile + 8 Laser with 4 Artemis and 2 Atlas parked on top	Loses every time

So about twenty turrets is the ceiling for this fleet, and the last row is the one that catches people out. Ships sitting on a planet fight alongside the turrets, so six extra hulls turned a comfortable win into a certain loss.

That is the same target as the spy report above, simulated straight from the report. Draw after six rounds, 19 Artemis and 3 Atlas gone, nothing plundered. Count everything the report shows and run it through the Calculator before you launch.

Armor Tech is what makes the swarm work at all. The same 24 Artemis with no Armor Tech beat 25 Missile Batteries about 1 time in 10 and lose around 22 fighters doing it. With Armor Tech 3 it is 8 times in 10 and about 12 fighters.

Two more rules make repeat raids on a defended planet a bad idea. Around 70 percent of the turrets you kill are rebuilt for free right after the battle, and defenses leave no debris at all. Ships leave 30 percent of their build cost as debris, which is the only salvage on the field, and on a losing raid all of it came out of your own fleet.

A.I. Tech 3 gives you four fleets, and the temptation is to split the swarm into four groups of one Atlas and six Artemis. That works on empty planets and on a lone parked fighter. It does not work against turrets, because six Artemis is nothing. 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 110 points of ships and drop straight back down the board. That is annoying but it is not fatal, and while your points are under 750 nobody can come after you at home while you rebuild.

The Artemis being cheap is the other reason to fly it. A replacement hull is 3,000 ore and 1,000 crystal, the research all stays, and the shipyard is the only thing you have to wait on. Rebuild the Atlas first, go back to inactive planets for a while, and read what to do when under attack before you park a fresh fleet on your planet overnight.

When you want more punch per hull, the next step up is the Apollo Platoon.