Battle Tactics — SFC2 Wiki

A ninja is an ambush. You leave something on a planet that looks worth taking, you wait for someone to launch at it, and you drop a fleet on top of that planet a few seconds before their attack lands. They arrive expecting a soft target and hit a wall. Their fleet dies, 30 percent of it turns into debris over your planet, and you harvest it.

It is the most profitable thing a defender can do in SFC2, and it is also the easiest way to lose a fleet if you get the timing wrong. This page covers both sides: how to set one up, and how not to fly into one.

Before you start

A few SFC2 rules shape everything below. Read these first or the rest will not make sense.

Ships only defend the planet they are parked on. There is no "guard" mission for your own planets. You move ships to your own planet with Deploy, and they sit there until you send them somewhere else.
A fleet in flight cannot be touched. Nothing can intercept a moving fleet. That is what makes the ambush work and it is also what makes fleet saving work.
The defender always sees an incoming attack. Every attack shows up on your Fleets page with a live countdown, whatever your research looks like. How much you see about the fleet depends on your Espionage Tech: level 2 shows the ship count, level 4 shows which ship types are coming, level 8 shows exact numbers of each.
Every attack is a formation. When you launch an attack in SFC2 it automatically creates an Attack Formation that other fleets can join, up to 7 fleets total. This matters for both sides and is covered further down.
Fleet slots are A.I. Tech level plus 1. A ninja burns several slots at once, so check you have room before you commit.

What you need

Three things: a bait planet, a nearby colony holding the real fleet, and enough hydrogen on the colony to launch at short notice.

The bait planet wants light defenses, a plausible reason for a raider to bother, and nothing you would mind losing. One or two Anti-Ballistic Missiles are worth having so a raider does not just missile the defenses flat first. Give it a few mine levels so it reads as a normal working colony rather than a bare trap.

The ambush colony wants the fleet, the recyclers, the haulers, and a big hydrogen stock. Put it a few systems away, not in the same system. Same system flights are so short that you cannot fine tune the arrival, and a raider probing the target will usually glance at the neighbouring slots.

Setting the trap

There are three baits. They differ in what you are risking and how greedy the raider has to be.

Option 1: leave resources sitting out

Park a large pile of ore and crystal on the bait planet with only a handful of Atlas Class Cargo on hand, so it looks like you could not evacuate in time even if you noticed. Attackers plunder 50 percent of what is on the planet, or 55 percent if they have declared war on you, capped by the cargo space they brought.

One thing to watch: the espionage report shows plunderable resources, not raw totals. Whatever your Resource Den protects is invisible to a spy and cannot be taken. If your Den is high and your pile is small, the bait shows up as almost nothing and nobody bites.

That is what a raider sees before he commits. Resources, a thin fleet, light defenses, and a couple of ABMs. Buildings and technologies are blanked out because his Espionage Tech was not far enough ahead of the defender's. The buttons at the bottom are the whole reason this bait works: he can launch the attack, throw the numbers into the Calculator, or send recyclers, without leaving the report.

Option 1 is the tightest of the three, because you also want to move the resources off before the attack lands. That means a Transport out of the bait planet timed into a window of a few seconds. If that sounds like more clicking than you want under pressure, use option 2 or 3.

Option 2: leave solar satellites out

Helios Class Solar Satellites cost 2,000 crystal each and count as ships, so 30 percent of that cost becomes debris when they die. That is 600 crystal per satellite. Fifty of them is a 30,000 crystal debris field, a hundred is 60,000. To a passing raider that reads as free crystal for one round of shooting.

Helios satellites do not come back after a battle. Only the Genesis Solar Satellite, which costs 10,000 credits, regenerates, at the same 70 percent rate as defenses, so do not use Genesis as bait. You want the bait to actually die and leave debris.

You do not need cargo ships on the ambush colony for this one. Just the fleet and the recyclers.

Option 3: leave a small fleet out

Same idea as option 2, but with real ships instead of satellites. Anything you park is at risk, so use fodder you were going to replace anyway, and remember the raider gets to see it before he launches. A pile of Artemis next to two ABMs looks like a lazy player, which is exactly the read you want.

Timing the ambush

Once someone launches at the bait planet, your Fleets page shows the attack and the countdown. From there it is arithmetic.

Open a Deploy from the ambush colony to the bait planet, load the fleet, and use the Speed dropdown to stretch the flight until the Duration lines up. Speed runs from 5 percent to 100 percent in 5 percent steps, so you have plenty of resolution.

Slower is not free: it costs less hydrogen but it also locks the fleet slot for longer, and it gives the raider more chances to look. Work out the 100 percent flight time first, then pick the speed that lands you where you want to be.

Aim to land somewhere between 5 and 60 seconds before the attack. Landing earlier is safer for you but gives a careful raider time to spot the change and recall. Landing later means you were not there for the battle at all and your fleet arrives to a looted planet.

That is a ninja in flight. The Deploy lands at 18:10, the attack lands at 18:53. Forty three seconds. The Deploy row has a Cancel button right up until it arrives, so if the raider recalls first you can pull your fleet back and nothing is lost but hydrogen.

If you went with option 1, send the Transport off the bait planet as soon as your fleet has landed, not before. Resources on a planet under attack are still yours until the battle resolves.

Letting an ally do it

You do not have to fly the ambush yourself. An alliance mate or a buddy can send a Group Defend to your bait planet, and their fleet hovers over it for anywhere from 1 to 24 hours before going home. Anything that attacks while they are hovering fights them too.

That is much easier than a second-perfect Deploy, because the fleet is already parked when the raider launches instead of racing his countdown. Up to 6 defending fleets can sit over one planet at once. The catch is that Group Defend only works on ally and buddy planets, so you cannot use it on your own colonies. That is what Deploy is for.

Recyclers are slow. A Dionysus Class Recycler moves at base speed 2,000, slower than any warship you would bring, so send them separately and set them to arrive a minute or two after the battle. Send them too early and they sit in the fight and die.

What it looks like when it lands

Here is a real one. A raider sent 180 Athena, 140 Poseidon, 320 Apollo and 700 Artemis at a colony with 45 Laser Cannons, 14 Pulse Cannons, 70 Missile Batteries and 80 Helios satellites. Forty three seconds before impact, 480 Athena, 260 Poseidon, 90 Prometheus, 1,400 Artemis and 900 Apollo dropped in.

Four rounds, defender wins, attacker loses every ship. The numbers:

Attacker lost 20.1 million ore and crystal of ships, all of it.
Defender lost 3.6 million ore and crystal of ships, mostly fodder.
Defenses lost about 100,000, and roughly 70 percent of the destroyed defenses rebuilt themselves for free straight after the battle.
Debris field: 5,254,800 ore and 1,863,450 crystal.

Two things worth pulling out of that. First, the debris is 30 percent of the ore and crystal build cost of every ship that died, including your own, so your losses partly come back to you. Second, defenses never leave debris and hydrogen never becomes debris, so do not count either when you estimate the payout.

A ninja is not free. You paid 3.6 million in ships to kill 20.1 million. That is a good trade, but it is a trade, and it goes badly if you misjudged the fleet coming at you. Run the numbers in the Calculator first. It sits in the top nav and it will give you the winner, the rounds, the plunder, the debris, the DSP, and how many recyclers you need.

Cleaning up

The debris field shows in the DEBRIS column on the Galaxy page for everyone in that system, not just you. A field that size is worth someone else's trip, so get your recyclers moving.

Work out how many you need before you launch: a Dionysus carries 20,000 and a Zagreus Class Recycler carries 5,000 but flies faster. Seven million of debris is around 356 Dionysus loads. If you do not have that many, send what you have and run more trips, or use the Harvest mission's auto-select, which picks your fastest recyclers first and only sends as many as the field actually needs.

Large debris fields can also form a moon over the planet. The chance is total debris divided by 15 million, capped at 20 percent. The field has to be worth at least 150,000 for the roll to happen at all, the slot must not already have a moon, and only a real player's planet can gain one.

How to avoid a ninja

Now the other side. You are the one attacking and you would rather not hand your fleet to somebody's colony.

Probe right before you land

The simple answer is to send an espionage mission timed to land shortly before your attack, and recall if a fleet has appeared that was not there when you launched. If they bothered to ninja you, they sent enough to win.

Two SFC2 problems with that. A Hermes Class Probe puts an incoming Espionage row on the defender's Fleets page while it is still flying, and when it lands they get an "Espionage Detected" message naming you and the planet you sent it from. So a late probe is also a warning shot. And if they have ships parked and better Espionage Tech than you, counterespionage can shoot your probes down: the chance rises with the number of probes you send and the number of ships sitting on the target.

Shadow Probes fix all of that. They do not appear on the defender's Fleets page, they send no detection message, they cannot be shot down, and they return a full report regardless of anyone's tech. They are consumed on arrival and they cost 20,000 credits each, which is the trade. If you are about to commit a real fleet, one Shadow Probe is cheap insurance.

Buy yourself time to look

An experienced ninja will land 5 or 10 seconds before you, which is not enough time to send a probe, read the report and decide. You can widen that window using formations.

Every attack you launch creates an Attack Formation, and the Formation button on the fleet row opens it. From another of your planets you can join your own formation. The whole group waits for the slowest fleet, so joining with one slow Hermes pushes the arrival back.

The steps:

Launch the attack normally.
Open Formation on that fleet row, switch to another of your planets, and use "Join from ...".
Join with a single Hermes Class Probe at a low speed so its flight time is roughly a minute longer than the attack's remaining time. The formation's arrival slides back to match.
Send your real espionage mission so it lands about 30 seconds before the new arrival time.
Recall the probe fleet before impact so it does not get shot and does not waste a slot.
If a fleet has appeared, hit Withdraw. A withdrawn fleet turns round and goes home, and it does not count against your bashing limit.

There is a cap: a joining fleet can only push the arrival back by 30 percent of the original flight time, in total across all joiners. On a one hour flight that is 18 minutes of slack, which is far more than you need. On a five minute flight it is 90 seconds, which is not much. Long attacks are easier to protect this way than short ones.

Read the whole neighbourhood

Probing the target planet is not enough. Probe the other planets the same player owns nearby, because that is where the ambush fleet is parked. If a player has a fat, badly defended colony two systems from a quiet colony you cannot see into, treat it as a trap until proven otherwise.

The Oracle makes this quick if you have a moon with one. It sweeps the surrounding systems for active players and lets you fire espionage straight from the results, so you can scan a whole area before you pick a target rather than probing planets one at a time.

Things that should make you walk away

A big resource pile on a colony with almost no defenses and only a few cargo ships.
50 to 100 solar satellites with two ABMs and nothing else.
A Zeus Class parked over a pile of satellites. A Zeus alone leaves 1.5 million ore and 1.2 million crystal in debris, which is exactly the kind of number that stops people thinking. Nobody leaves one out by accident.
Anything that looks tuned to be tempting rather than merely neglected. Real inactive players are messy. Bait is tidy.

One last thing worth knowing on both sides: newbie protection means you cannot attack, or be attacked by, anyone under 750 resources spent, and above that both players have to be within 5x of each other unless you are both over 25,000. And you can only attack the same player 6 times in 24 hours unless you are at war. Neither rule stops a ninja, but they do decide who can walk into one.