Defenses are guns you bolt onto a planet. They fight for you whenever someone attacks it, they cost nothing to keep, and they never move. You build them on the Defense page and they stay on that planet for good.
Pound for pound a defense buys more hull and more gun than a ship does. The trade is that it only ever protects the one planet it sits on. A defense cannot escort a fleet, cannot be sent anywhere, and cannot be added to a group defend somewhere else.
What defenses do that ships do not
They leave no debris. A ship that dies drops 30 percent of its ore and crystal into the debris field for someone to harvest. A defense drops nothing at all. Whatever the attacker breaks is gone from the game, and there is no salvage in it for either side. That is the single biggest reason raiders dislike hitting a defended planet: they pay for the fight in ships and they get nothing back off the corpses.
Most of them come back. When the battle ends, roughly 70 percent of every defense that was destroyed is rebuilt on the spot, free. More on that below.
They do not use fields. Buildings and mines eat planet fields. Defenses do not, so there is no limit on how many you can pile up.
Missiles can reach them. A fleet cannot be touched by a missile strike. Defenses can. Anyone who invests heavily in defenses should read the ABM page before they get much further.
Planets only
Defenses need a Shipyard on the planetoid, and a Shipyard cannot be built on a moon. Moons only get the Lunar Base, Capitol, Oracle, Warp Gate and Lunar Dock, so a moon carries no defenses whatsoever. A deployed Hephaestus platform cannot own defenses either, and it does not even get a Defense tab.
Where you build them
Defense sits in the top nav next to Shipyard. Every defense you have unlocked gets a row with its picture, its stats, a quantity box and a Build button.
Each row shows Base next to Current. Base is the raw number. Current is what your research has done to it. Every level of Weapons Tech adds 10 percent of base attack, every level of Shield Tech adds 10 percent of base shield, and every level of Armor Tech adds 10 percent of base hull. None of it compounds. The planet in the shot above has Weapons 9, Shield 8 and Armor 11, which is why the Missile Battery reads 152 attack, 36 shield and 420 hull instead of 80, 20 and 200.
Build time works off ore and crystal only. Hydrogen never counts toward it.
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So one Plasma Cannon on a bare Shipyard 8 with no Foundry takes 100,000 divided by 45,000, which is 2 hours 13 minutes. Add a Foundry and every level of it halves that again.
A few things about the queue. Ships and defenses share the same one, so a big fleet order will hold up your cannons and the other way round. You can move items up and down with the arrows in the queue panel, but you cannot cancel one once it is in. You also cannot start anything at all while the Shipyard or the Foundry on that planet is upgrading.
The defense list
| Defense | Hull | Shield | Attack | Ships with rapid fire against it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Missile Battery | 200 | 20 | 80 | Zeus x200, Ares x20, Poseidon x10 |
| Laser Cannon | 200 | 25 | 100 | Zeus x200, Ares x20, Prometheus x10 |
| Pulse Cannon | 800 | 100 | 250 | Zeus x100, Ares x10 |
| Particle Cannon | 800 | 500 | 150 | Zeus x100, Ares x10 |
| Gauss Cannon | 3,500 | 200 | 1,100 | Zeus x50 |
| Plasma Cannon | 10,000 | 300 | 3,000 | none |
| Decoy | 2,000 | 2,000 | 0 | none |
| Large Decoy | 10,000 | 10,000 | 0 | none |
Those eight are the whole list of things that shoot. The Anti-Ballistic Missile and the Interplanetary Ballistic Missile are built on the same page but they take no part in a fleet battle at all.
If you played the old game, note that the Space Mine is not in SFC2, and neither are the Cirrus, Magnon, Typhon, Mantus, Thanatos or Pallas ships. Any rapid fire you remember involving those is gone. Nothing in SFC2 rapid fires the Plasma Cannon or either Decoy.
Cost and requirements
| Defense | Ore | Crystal | Hydrogen | Building | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Missile Battery | 2,000 | 0 | 0 | Shipyard 1 | none |
| Laser Cannon | 1,500 | 500 | 0 | Shipyard 2 | Laser Tech 2 |
| Pulse Cannon | 6,000 | 2,000 | 0 | Shipyard 4 | Laser Tech 6, Energy Tech 3 |
| Particle Cannon | 2,000 | 6,000 | 0 | Shipyard 4 | Particle Tech 4 |
| Gauss Cannon | 20,000 | 15,000 | 2,000 | Shipyard 6 | Weapons Tech 3, Energy Tech 6, Shield Tech 1 |
| Plasma Cannon | 50,000 | 50,000 | 30,000 | Shipyard 8 | Plasma Tech 7 |
| Decoy | 10,000 | 10,000 | 0 | Shipyard 1 | Shield Tech 2 |
| Large Decoy | 50,000 | 50,000 | 0 | Shipyard 6 | Shield Tech 6 |
| Anti-Ballistic Missile | 8,000 | 0 | 2,000 | Missile Silo 2 | none |
| Interplanetary Ballistic Missile | 12,500 | 2,500 | 10,000 | Missile Silo 4 | Pulse Drive 1 |
Add the three resource costs together and you get almost exactly 100 hull per 1,000 resources on everything in the list. The Gauss is a shade worse at 95 and the Plasma is well behind at 77. What actually separates the units is where the rest of the money goes. The Laser Cannon is the most gun you can buy per resource at 50 attack per 1,000. The Particle Cannon is the most shield at 62 per 1,000 if you leave the decoys out. The Plasma pays for concentration, not for stats: nothing rapid fires it, and it is the only defense that puts a serious dent in a battleship on its own.
How a defense fights
Every defense on the planet joins every attack on that planet automatically, next to any ships parked there and any allied fleets sitting on group defend. You do not deploy them and you cannot hold them back.
A battle runs a maximum of six rounds. Inside a round every unit on both sides fires once, then rapid fire lets some ships keep firing at fresh targets. Shields go back to full at the start of every round. Hull damage does not: that carries all the way through.
Two rules matter more than people expect.
Small shots bounce. If a shot is worth 1 percent or less of the target's full shield it does nothing at all, and it also ends that ship's rapid fire chain for the round. A Large Decoy on a planet with Shield Tech 8 carries 18,000 shield, so anything hitting for 180 or less simply pings off it.
Numbers waste shots. Attackers pick their target at random, and a unit that dies early in a round can still be shot at for the rest of that round. Those hits are thrown away. That is why a wall of cheap cannons is worth more than the stat sheet suggests, and it is why fodder works.
The last piece is the win condition. The attacker only takes plunder if every single unit on the defending side is dead at the end of round six. One surviving Missile Battery means the raid pays nothing.
How much does a wall actually buy you
Here is the same defensive budget of about one million resources spent six different ways, against 100 Athena Battleships, with no research on either side. Numbers are averages over 200 runs of the live battle engine.
| Defense bought | Defenses lost | Athena killed | Attacker wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 Missile Battery | 478 of 500 | 0 | 0% |
| 500 Laser Cannon | 477 of 500 | 0.2 | 0% |
| 125 Pulse Cannon | all | 0 | 100% |
| 125 Particle Cannon | all | 0 | 100% |
| 27 Gauss Cannon | all | 1.6 | 100% |
| 7 Plasma Cannon | all | 3.3 | 100% |
Read that carefully, because it is not what most people guess. The two cheap cannons kill almost nothing, but there are so many of them that 100 Athena cannot clear the planet inside six rounds, so the raid never wins and never gets a single unit of plunder. The expensive cannons kill more ships and then die to the last unit, handing over the whole warehouse. Add the free rebuild on top and the Missile Battery wall keeps about 356 of its 500 guns while the Plasma Cannons keep 5 of 7.
None of that makes the big cannons useless. It means a defense is doing one of two different jobs, and you should know which one you are buying. Cheap bodies deny the win. Big guns make the attacker pay in ships. A real wall runs both, and the Decoy and Large Decoy sit on top as bodies nothing rapid fires.
The free rebuild
The moment a battle ends, about 70 percent of every defense that was destroyed is rebuilt for nothing. It is not a coin flip per unit. The game works out roughly 70 percent of the loss and gives that back, with a small amount of wobble either way. In the report above the defender lost 67 Missile Battery, 40 Laser Cannon and 13 Pulse Cannon and got 51, 27 and 9 straight back.
Both sides see the Regeneration table in the battle report, so an attacker knows exactly what grew back. Note also that there is no Debris section in that report at all. Nothing was salvageable, because defenses were the only thing that died.
The Genesis Solar Satellite is the one ship that gets the same 70 percent treatment. Everything else that dies stays dead.
One important limit. The rebuild only happens after a fleet battle. Defenses destroyed by a missile strike are gone permanently.
Missiles
Two more things are built on the Defense page and neither of them fights.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile unlocks at Missile Silo level 2. It fires on its own and each one shoots down exactly one incoming missile. It cannot be aimed and it cannot be targeted.
The Interplanetary Ballistic Missile unlocks at Missile Silo level 4 and is the offensive half. Each one carries 12,000 attack, plus 10 percent per level of your Weapons Tech, and it ignores shields completely. Damage lands on the target you picked first, then spills into the cheapest remaining defenses until it runs out. The defender's Armor Tech still hardens the hulls it is chewing through. An enemy stockpile of IBMs can be targeted; a stockpile of ABMs cannot.
Range is (5 × your Pulse Drive level) minus 1 solar systems, and only inside the same galaxy. Missiles live in the silo, which holds 10 slots per level. An ABM takes one slot and an IBM takes two. Both can be scrapped instantly from the More Info panel with the Deconstruct box, and you get nothing back for them.
Things that catch people out
- No moon can hold defenses, because no moon can hold a Shipyard.
- You get one Decoy and one Large Decoy per planet, and anything sitting in the queue counts against that. There is no way to take one back down.
- A defense build order cannot be cancelled once it is in the queue, only reordered.
- Defenses do not raise your plunder protection or hide your resources. That is the Resource Den.
- An espionage report shows your full defense list to anyone who gets one tier past reading your fleet, so a scout who does the job properly already knows the exact wall they have to break.
- Defenses count toward Resources Spent on the leaderboard like everything else, so a big wall raises your rank and makes you a more interesting target.
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