Athena Class Battleship

The Athena Class Battleship is the cheapest big warship in SFC2 and the ship most large fleets are built around. It costs no hydrogen at all, it hits for 1,000, it carries 1,500 cargo and it runs on Warp Drive from the day you unlock it.

What it does not have is rapid fire against anything that shoots back. That one gap decides how you use it. An Athena wall on its own gets beaten by an equal-cost swarm of cheap ships, and the Hades Class tears it apart. Put cheap hulls in front of it and it is the best value firepower in the game.

Building one

Athena are built on the Shipyard page. You need Shipyard level 7 and Warp Drive 4. Warp Drive is the long pole. It sits behind Research Lab 7 and FTL Tech 3, and FTL Tech itself wants Energy Tech 5 and Shield Tech 5. Nothing there is exotic, but you will have a real lab running before your first Athena 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 of base attack per level, Shield Tech adds 10 percent of base shield and Armor Tech adds 10 percent of base hull. The commander above is running Weapons 9, Shield 8 and Armor 11, which turns 1,000 / 200 / 6,000 into 1,900 / 360 / 12,600. The speed reading of 34,000 is Warp Drive 8 on a 10,000 base.

Build time is 1:30:00 each at Shipyard 7 with no Foundry. The planet above, at Shipyard 9 and Foundry 4, turns one out every 4:30.

Every Athena that dies leaves 13,500 ore and 4,500 crystal in the debris field, the flat 30 percent of build cost that every ship leaves behind. Since there is no hydrogen in the build, nothing in an Athena is lost for good. Everything you spent is either flying or sitting in a debris field waiting for a recycler.

Why it is the cheap one

Compare ships by what they cost in one number, counting crystal at 1.67 ore and hydrogen at 2.5 ore. The Athena is second only to the Apollo for firepower per resource, and it is tied with the Artemis for the cheapest hull in the game.

Ship	Cost in ore	Per point of attack	Per point of hull
Apollo Class Fighter	10,167	68	12.0
Athena Class Battleship	70,000	70	11.7
Prometheus Class Destroyer	180,835	90	16.4
Poseidon Class Cruiser	36,667	92	13.6
Artemis Class Fighter	4,667	93	11.7
Ares Class Bomber	129,168	129	17.2
Hades Class Battleship	134,168	192	19.2

That is the whole case for the ship. A Hades costs nearly twice an Athena and hits for 700 instead of 1,000. Per resource spent, an Athena brings almost three times the firepower. The old wiki line about the Athena hitting twice as hard as a Hades was never true on raw numbers, but the value gap is bigger than that line claimed.

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 30 is 97 percent, a rating of 7 is 86 percent and a rating of 5 is 80 percent.

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

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

Rapid fires the Athena	Rating
Zeus Class	x30
Hades Class Battleship	x7

The first list is satellites and probes, which is another way of saying the Athena has no rapid fire. Nothing on it can hurt you back. Every other combat ship in the game is a straight one shot per round for an Athena.

The second list is short but it is the one that matters. The Hades is not a rare ship, and x7 means a Hades that hits an Athena gets another shot 86 percent of the time.

The Hades problem

This is the single most important thing to know about the Athena. These are Calculator runs with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides, and both fleets cost the same, about 28 million ore once crystal and hydrogen are converted.

Four hundred Athena go in against 208 Hades. Every Athena dies in three rounds and 94 Hades die. The attacker walks away 14.7 million down and there is no return trip. It is not close and no amount of research fixes it, because the defender's research climbs at the same rate as yours.

The fix is fodder. Targets in a battle are picked at random from every live enemy unit, so cheap hulls in your own fleet soak the shots that would otherwise land on your Athena. Same 28 million on the attacking side every time:

Attacking 208 Hades	Result
400 Athena	every Athena dies in 3 rounds, 94 Hades die
200 Athena + 1,377 Apollo	wins in 5 rounds, loses 39 Athena and about 1,250 Apollo
200 Athena + 3,000 Artemis	wins in 5 rounds, loses no Athena at all and about 570 Artemis

Same money, same enemy, total loss turned into a clean win by spending half of it on the cheapest ship in the game. The Artemis mix is better than the Apollo mix because you get more hulls per resource, and every hull is one more thing for the Hades to shoot at instead of your Athena.

Fleet against fleet

Same Calculator settings, 400 Athena attacking, everything on the other side costing the same 28 million.

400 Athena against	Result
208 Hades	every Athena dies, 94 Hades die
2,754 Apollo	every Athena dies, about 1,490 Apollo die
6,000 Artemis	runs out of rounds, loses about 330 and kills about 1,960
763 Poseidon	wipes them out in 6 rounds, loses about 112
216 Ares	wins in 5 rounds, loses about 58
154 Prometheus	wins in 5 rounds, loses about 170

The pattern is easy to read. The Athena beats the expensive ships and loses to the cheap ones. Against the Ares and the Prometheus, both of which cost far more per point of attack, an Athena fleet wins and comes home. Against a swarm it is outnumbered seven to one and the swarm has more hulls to hide behind.

A battle stops after six rounds. Against 6,000 Artemis the Athena fleet is still shooting when the clock runs out, which counts as nothing gained: the survivors stay put, they shoot at you the whole way, and you come home empty.

Ship for ship the Ares beats the Athena, since it has 7,500 hull and 500 shield against the Athena's 6,000 and 200 for the same 1,000 attack. Four hundred Athena against 400 Ares lose the lot. You need about two Athena per Ares to win comfortably, and two Athena still cost less than one Ares, which is why the equal-cost line above goes the other way.

Cracking defenses

The Athena can knock down a defended planet, it is just not the cheap way to do it. Here is a wall 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.

Attacker	Result
400 Athena	runs out of rounds with about 30 units still standing, loses 132
800 Athena	clears it in 5 rounds, loses about 44
433 Ares (same spend as 800 Athena)	clears it in 3 rounds, loses about 17
5,508 Apollo (same spend)	clears it in 3 or 4 rounds, loses about 221

The Ares is the right tool because it is the only normal ship with real rapid fire against turrets. The Athena gets there by brute force and pays more for it. If you are only breaking one wall, send Athena you already own rather than building bombers you will never use again. If you break walls often, build Ares.

Either way, remember that defenses leave no debris at all, and about 70 percent of destroyed defenses are rebuilt for free after every battle. Flattening a wall is how you get at a planet's resources. It never pays for itself.

Speed and fuel

The Athena starts on Warp Drive and stays there. There is no engine swap to wait for, unlike the Ares or the Atlas. Warp Drive adds 30 percent of the 10,000 base per level, so Warp 4 is 22,000, Warp 8 is 34,000 and Warp 12 is 46,000.

That makes it one of the fastest heavy ships in the game and an exact match for the Hades, which also runs Warp Drive off a 10,000 base. Only the Poseidon and the Artemis are faster. Adding a Prometheus to an Athena fleet halves its speed, because a fleet only moves as fast as its slowest ship.

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

Distance	Warp 4	Warp 6	Warp 8	Warp 12	Hydrogen
Same system, 1 slot away	19:48	17:34	15:57	13:43	58
Same system, 10 slots away	20:14	17:57	16:18	14:02	60
1 system away	32:58	29:14	26:32	22:50	160
5 systems away	35:08	31:09	28:17	24:19	182
10 systems away	37:40	33:24	30:19	26:04	209
25 systems away	44:23	39:22	35:44	30:44	290
50 systems away	53:46	47:40	43:16	37:13	426
1 galaxy away	1:28:02	1:18:03	1:10:50	1:00:55	1,143

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

An Athena burns 500 hydrogen per trip before distance is applied. That is twice a Hades and half an Ares. Sending 400 of them one galaxy over costs 457,200 hydrogen before you have fired a shot. Holding one on a group defend costs 50 hydrogen an hour, so 400 of them parked over a friend's planet burn 20,000 an hour.

Carrying the loot

At 1,500 each, the Athena has more cargo room than any warship except the Prometheus. Four hundred of them hold 600,000 resources between them, which is enough that a raiding fleet often does not need cargo ships at all. You take 50 percent of what is sitting on the planet, or 55 percent if your alliance is at war with theirs, minus whatever their Resource Den hides.

Only the surviving ships carry anything home, so a fleet that wins badly comes back half empty. Bring recyclers if you also want the debris.

Big targets

A shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all. An Athena hits for 1,000 before research, which is over the line against a Zeus Class and its 50,000 shield. That makes the Athena one of only four ships that can hurt a Zeus at base research, along with the Ares, the Hades and the Prometheus. Apollos, Artemis and Poseidons all bounce off it. Twenty thousand Athena kill a Zeus in the first round and lose about 21 doing it, although the Zeus rapid fires the Athena at 30, so it gets a fresh shot 97 percent of the time.

The Hephaestus Class Attack Platform is a different story. At 150,000 shield an Athena 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, Athena do nothing to a Hephaestus at all. Twenty thousand of them sat through all six rounds without either side losing a single ship.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Research Lab 7
Energy Tech 5
Shield Tech 5
FTL Tech 3
Shipyard 7
Warp Drive 4
Athena Class Battleship