Decoy

The Decoy is a defense with no weapon on it. All it has is a big shield and a big hull, and its whole job is to soak up hits that would otherwise land on your cannons. You build it on the Defense page and you can only ever have one on a planet.

What it does in a battle

The Decoy's shield absorbs damage until it is used up, and only then does the hull start taking hits. At the start of every round the shield goes back to full. A base Decoy has 2,000 shield, so it eats up to 2,000 damage every round for nothing. Whatever is left over comes off its 2,000 hull, and hull damage does carry from one round to the next.

Nothing in the game has rapid fire against the Decoy. The More Info panel on the Defense page says it in as many words: "No rapid fire vulnerability". That is worth more than it sounds. A ship with rapid fire keeps picking fresh targets and firing again until it rolls something it has no rapid fire against, so the moment an Ares or a Zeus hits the Decoy, that chain ends for the round.

There is one more thing that gets missed. An attack only counts as a win, and only pays plunder, if every unit on the defending side is gone by the end of round six. The Decoy is a cheap extra body that is hard to kill, so it drags attacks that would have been clean wins back to a draw.

Where to build it

Defense page, same as the rest of your defenses. The planet needs a Shipyard at level 1 and you need Shield Tech at level 2. The row shows Base next to Current so you can see what your research has done to it. The Decoy above sits on a planet with Shield Tech 8 and Armor Tech 11, which is why 2,000 shield reads 3,600 and 2,000 hull reads 4,200.

One per planet

You get one Decoy and one Large Decoy per planet and that is it. Once yours is finished the Build button turns into Max Reached. Anything sitting in the build queue counts as well, so you cannot slip a second one in behind the first. A moon is its own planetoid, so a moon with a Shipyard on it carries its own Decoy separately.

There is no way to take one back down again. Deconstruct only exists for missiles, so once it is up it stays up.

Two Athena will not scratch it

Put a Decoy on a planet with no other defense and no ships on it, then send two Athena at it with no Weapons Tech. Six rounds later nothing has happened. Each Athena hits for 1,000 and the shield is 2,000, so the pair of them use the shield up exactly and never reach the hull. The attacker goes home having paid for the fuel and nothing else.

Here is where the line sits for each attacking ship against a lone Decoy, with the attacker on no Weapons Tech and the defender on no Shield Tech.

Attacking ship	Never gets through	Always kills it
Artemis Fighter	41 or fewer	47
Apollo Fighter	13 or fewer	16
Poseidon Cruiser	5 or fewer	6
Hades Battleship	2 or fewer	4
Athena Battleship	2 or fewer	3
Ares Bomber	2 or fewer	3
Prometheus Destroyer	1	2

In between those two columns is a band where it dies some of the time. Any unit that has lost more than 30 percent of its hull can blow up at the end of a round it took a hit in, even with hull left, which is why 3 Hades or 14 Apollo kill a Decoy on some runs and not others.

Every level of Shield Tech adds 200 to the shield and every level of Armor Tech adds 200 to the hull. Both are worked out from the base number rather than compounding. Push the shield far enough and small shots stop registering at all, because anything doing 1 percent or less of the Decoy's shield bounces off for nothing. At Shield Tech 15 the shield is 5,000, and 5,000 Artemis on no Weapons Tech do literally zero damage to a single Decoy.

Is it worth the 20,000?

The old complaint about the Decoy is fair as far as it goes. It has no attack, and it does not pull fire, because every shot in the battle picks its target at random out of everything you have. Once you are sitting on a few hundred turrets the odds of any one shot landing on the Decoy are small.

What it does do is refuse to be the last one standing. Here is a wall of 100 Missile Battery, 50 Laser Cannon, 30 Pulse Cannon, 20 Particle Cannon and 10 Gauss Cannon, both sides on Weapons, Shield and Armor 5, against a raid of Athena. The number is the chance the raid clears the planet and gets to plunder.

Athena in the raid	No decoys	Decoy	Decoy and Large Decoy
55	9%	4%	0%
60	78%	54%	0%
65	99%	98%	13%
70	100%	100%	66%
80	100%	100%	100%

Both decoys together cost 120,000 in ore and crystal, which is about a ninth of what that wall cost, and they push the raid needed to crack it from around 60 Athena to around 70. They will not save you from someone who has properly outgrown you. They do punish anyone who turns up with just barely enough.

After the battle

Defenses leave no debris in SFC2, so nothing the attacker kills on the ground can be recycled afterwards. On top of that, about 70 percent of everything of yours that was destroyed is rebuilt for free the moment the battle ends, and the Decoy is included. The battle report lists what came back under Regeneration. For a single Decoy that works out at roughly a 7 in 10 chance it is standing again before you have finished reading the report.

Cost

Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen
10,000	10,000	0

Stats

Attack	Shield	Hull
0	2,000	2,000

Requirements

Shipyard (level 1)
Shield Tech (level 2)