Defensive strategy guide

This guide is for the player who intends to stick around but does not want to be glued to the screen. It takes you from your first hour to the point where your planets are not worth raiding. Everything in it is about not losing what you have built. For the other half of the game, see the advanced strategy guide.

What you start with

Your homeworld is always 163 fields, and it always starts with 25,000 ore, 12,500 crystal and 5,000 hydrogen. On the ground you get Capitol level 2, Shipyard level 3 and Research Lab level 1. In orbit you get two Artemis fighters, two Hermes probes and one Atlas cargo. Account wide you already have Energy Tech 3 and Jet Drive 3.

All of that adds up to about 37 RSP. Keep that number in mind, because the entire early game comes down to how you spend the next seven hundred or so.

The first thing to do is put those five ships to work on the Missions page. Missions are pure profit. No player can interfere with one, nothing gets shot down, and the ships come home. While a mission is running the ships are off the planet completely, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

Any task in the game with less than five minutes left can be finished instantly for free. That covers buildings, research, the shipyard queue and missions. Early on almost everything you start is under five minutes, so you can chain jobs back to back without waiting on anything. Push the ore and crystal mines until they cross that five minute line, then start the Hydrogen Synthesizer just before you go to bed. Keep the Solar Array climbing so the mines stay fed.

You start with one fleet slot, so out of the gate you can only have one mission running at a time. A.I. Tech level 1 costs 400 crystal and 600 hydrogen, needs nothing but the Research Lab you already have, and takes you to two. It is probably the best value research in the game at that point and most people leave it far too long.

Check Quests while you do it. Most of what you were going to do anyway ticks a quest off, and the rewards are free resources and lucky draw tokens.

Newbie protection and the 750 mark

You begin under newbie protection. While it is on, no player can attack you and no player can even send a probe at you. You can still hit NPCs and you can still hit players who have gone inactive, so nothing is stopping you from playing.

Protection ends the moment your RSP reaches 750. Nothing else ends it, and once it is gone it does not come back.

RSP is worth understanding properly, because a lot of people have it wrong. It is not a running total of everything you have ever spent. It is a snapshot of what you own right now: every building, mine, power plant, tech level, ship and defense you currently hold, each valued at its build cost divided by one thousand. Stockpiled ore, crystal and hydrogen count for nothing at all. A full warehouse is invisible on the scoreboard, and losing a fleet or tearing down a building genuinely lowers your score. The number is recalculated once an hour, so it can lag a little behind what you just finished building.

That gives you a lever. If you want more time before protection ends, park your income in resources instead of in structures and ships.

When you do cross 750, you get a screen you cannot click past.

Two buttons. "I Understand" drops you into the open game. "Enter Diplomacy Mode" switches on Diplomacy Mode right there with no waiting, and that is the only time in the game you get it instantly rather than waiting 24 hours for it to activate. Diplomacy stops attacks but cuts your production: 75 percent of normal while you are under 50,000 RSP, 50 percent from there to 100,000, and 25 percent above that. It is a real shield with a real price.

Leaving protection does not mean everybody can suddenly hit you. Until the smaller of you and the other player reaches 25,000 RSP, the two of you have to be within a factor of five of each other to fight at all. Someone five times your size cannot touch you, and you cannot touch them. In the galaxy list that shows up as a letter in the status column: a small n means the target is protected or too small for you, a capital N means they are too strong for you.

There is one hole in all of this, and it catches somebody every month. Protection of any kind stops applying to a player who has not logged in for seven days. An inactive account is attackable by anyone at any size, newbie or not. If you are going away, read the section on shields before you go.

Spend on things that do not get shot down

You have three places to put resources, and they differ in how easily somebody can take them back off you.

Research can never be lost. Nobody can bomb a tech level. Every point you put into the Research Lab is yours forever.

Buildings cannot be raided either. An attacker takes resources, not building levels. You only ever lose a building by tearing it down or abandoning the planet yourself.

Ships are the thing that actually burns. A ship that dies is gone, and 30 percent of what it cost in ore and crystal drops into a debris field for the attacker to harvest on the way home. Building a fleet you are not around to use is the most common way a new player hands a raider a free meal.

Defenses sit in between. They can be destroyed, but about 70 percent of whatever gets destroyed is rebuilt for free the moment the battle ends, and they leave no debris at all.

So for a defensive player the order is Research Lab first, then Shipyard, with the mines climbing the whole time. Ships come last, and only when you are going to be around to fly them.

Getting your colonies

One planet means one building queue, one shipyard queue and one set of mines. Every colony you add is another of each running at the same time. You can hold ten planets in total, so nine colonies on top of the homeworld. Moons do not count against that limit.

Colonizing needs a Gaia Class colony ship, which needs Shipyard level 4 and Pulse Drive level 3. Pulse Drive needs Research Lab level 2 and Energy Tech 1, and you start with Energy Tech 3, so the real path is Research Lab to 2, Pulse Drive to 3, Shipyard to 4. Take the lab a bit past the minimum first. Research runs faster with a bigger lab and you wanted the levels anyway.

A Gaia costs 10,000 ore, 20,000 crystal and 10,000 hydrogen. That is exactly 40 RSP, and when the ship lands and becomes a planet, those 40 RSP come straight back off your score. Colonizing makes you smaller on paper, which is why you can plant a lot of planets without crossing 750.

Planting your colonies before protection ends is the best single thing you can do with the early game. Nine planets is nine things an attacker has to break instead of one.

Picking slots

Every solar system has 15 slots. The slot you land in fixes two things that never change afterwards: how many fields the planet has, and how hot it runs.

Fields are rolled from a range that depends on the slot number. Rough averages, with the flat 25 field colonization bonus already included:

Slots 1 to 3: around 85 to 100 fields, up to about 90 degrees
Slots 4 to 6: around 180 to 200 fields, up to about 65 degrees
Slots 7 to 9: around 165 to 185 fields, up to about 40 degrees
Slots 10 to 12: around 120 to 130 fields, around 0 degrees
Slots 13 to 15: around 110 to 135 fields, down to about minus 45 degrees

Those are averages, not promises. Roughly one colonization in six rolls a wildcard that lands high, often at or near the hard ceiling of 320 fields. The floor is 40.

Hot slots are good for Helios solar satellites, which make more energy the warmer the planet is. Cold slots are good for hydrogen: the coldest slots produce about a quarter more than the hottest ones, which also means they keep a Nuclear Power Plant fed.

A defensive player usually leans cold. Solar satellites are ships. They sit on the planet, they die in a battle, and they leave debris behind, so a planet you are not watching should not depend on them. The one exception is the Genesis Solar Satellite, which regenerates after a battle the same way a defense does. Hydrogen and a power plant do not care whether you are online.

Do not write a small planet off the way SFC1 players used to. Terraform buys 5 more fields at a time with credits, starting at 5,000 credits for a small colony and rising to 60,000 as you push toward the 320 cap. A 120 field colony is a slow project, not a mistake.

Ranges, and where to put your planets

Two things in this game only work inside the galaxy they are stationed in, and both have a range measured in solar systems.

The Oracle is a moon building. It needs a moon with a Lunar Base under it, it sweeps five solar systems per Oracle level in each direction, and every scan costs 5,000 hydrogen off that moon. It finds targets for you. It does not warn you about incoming fleets, so do not treat it as an alarm.

An Interplanetary Ballistic Missile reaches five systems per Pulse Drive level, minus one. Pulse Drive 3 gives you 14 systems, Pulse Drive 6 gives you 29, Pulse Drive 14 gives you 69.

Both stop dead at the galaxy boundary. Fleets do not. A fleet can cross from one galaxy to another, it just takes longer. The live universe is three galaxies of 300 solar systems each, so there is a lot of room and no real reason to fear the ends of a galaxy the way SFC1 players did.

What is still worth doing is keeping two or three of your planets in the same galaxy and reasonably close together. That is what lets you overlap missile coverage, run a group defend onto your own planet quickly, and move resources without a day of flight time. Spreading every planet across the map makes you harder to wipe out in one sitting but slower to reinforce, and for a defensive player reinforcement speed is usually worth more.

What can actually reach you

Five things, and that is the whole list.

A fleet attack. Ships fly in and fight whatever is standing on the planet. If they win they take up to 50 percent of the resources sitting there, or 55 percent if the two of you are at war.
A group attack. The same thing with several players stacking into one strike.
Espionage. Probes fly over and report what you have. It is cheap, it is constant, and it is what decides whether a real attack follows.
A missile strike. Missiles only ever hit defenses. They cannot touch a ship, they leave no debris, and anything they destroy does not come back. ABMs sitting in your Missile Silo shoot them down one for one.
A Hephaestus platform. A player parks one in an empty slot in your system and hits you from next door with almost no flight time.

One useful limit: the bashing rule caps any one player at six attacks on any one of your planets in a 24 hour window. NPC targets and declared wars are exempt. Six raids is still a bad day, but it is not unlimited.

The Hephaestus needs a genuinely free slot. A slot holding a player planet, a moon or another platform is closed to it. A slot holding nothing but an NPC outpost is not closed, so a system that looks full of outposts is not a blockade. A real blockade means players hold all 15 slots. Each player can only have one platform deployed at a time, which is the other reason they are rarer than their reputation suggests.

Make yourself a bad target

An attacker is doing arithmetic. They spend fuel and risk ships to take your resources and harvest your debris. If the numbers do not work they go somewhere else. Every defensive move in this game is really about making those numbers worse.

The cheapest move is to spend down. Resources sitting on a planet are the entire prize. Resources already turned into a mine level cannot be plundered by anybody.

The second cheapest is the Resource Den.

The Den hides a fixed pool of resources from plunder: 30,000 at level 1, and another 7,500 for every level after that. That pool is shared across all three resource types and spread as evenly as it can be, so a level 3 Den keeps 45,000 total out of an attacker's hands. It is cheap, it only costs one field per level, and it is the first building most defensive players put on a new colony.

The Den hides those resources from probes as well. A spy report only ever lists what the attacker could actually carry away, so a stocked Den makes your planet read as emptier than it really is. That is worth more than the plunder it saves, because most raids are chosen off a spy report.

Defenses

Defenses are built on the Defense page and they never leave the planet. Three things make them the backbone of a defensive account:

They leave no debris. A raider who breaks your guns gets nothing back off the wreckage. That alone kills the arithmetic on a lot of raids.
They mostly come back. Around 70 percent of everything destroyed in a battle is rebuilt free the instant the fight ends.
They use no fields. Buildings and mines eat fields. Defenses do not, so there is no ceiling on how many you can stack.

The catch is that missiles can reach them and missile kills are permanent. Anybody who invests seriously in defenses should build a Missile Silo and keep ABMs in it. Defenses also need a Shipyard on the planetoid, and a Shipyard cannot be built on a moon, so moons carry no defenses at all.

Do not build one of everything. Build a broad base of cheap guns so enemy rapid fire has something to chew through, and put the expensive ones behind it. The Missile Battery only needs Shipyard 1 and no research at all, which makes it the natural filler. The Decoy is worth having too: it has no gun, just a large pool of shield and hull, and nothing in the game rapid fires against it. You may only hold one Decoy and one Large Decoy per planet.

Get the fleet off the planet

A fleet parked on the planet when an attack lands is the biggest prize you can offer. A fleet in flight cannot be touched by anything.

The Fleets page has a Fleet Save mission for exactly this. It takes any ships you like plus as much cargo as they can carry, flies them to any slot you name, and brings them straight home. Nothing lands, nothing fights, and while they are out there they are untouchable. Pick a destination far enough away that the round trip covers however long you are going to be offline, and drop the speed percentage if you need to stretch it further. See fleet and resource saving for the details.

Two cheaper versions of the same idea:

Missions. Ships on a mission are off the planet and safe, and unlike a fleet save they pay you.
Deploy. Sending ships to another of your own planets moves them somewhere the attacker was not aiming at.

All of this runs on fleet slots, which come out at one plus your A.I. Tech level and are shared across your entire account. Missions take a slot each, the same as any other fleet, so A.I. Tech is what decides how many things you can have in the air at once. It is an easy research line to neglect and an annoying one to be short on.

See it coming

When somebody launches at you, an incoming attack appears on your Overview with a timer. How much detail you get with it depends entirely on your Espionage Tech level:

Level 0 or 1: you see that something is coming and when it arrives, and nothing else
Level 2: the total number of ships
Level 4: which ship types are in the fleet
Level 8: the exact count of every ship type

Getting to Espionage Tech 8 is one of the least glamorous and most useful things a defensive player can research. Knowing whether an incoming wave is twenty probes or two hundred bombers is the difference between shrugging and saving your fleet. See what to do when under attack for the rest of the drill.

Shields you can switch on

Three of them, and they are not interchangeable.

Diplomacy Mode blocks attacks in both directions and costs you production: 75 percent of normal under 50,000 RSP, 50 percent up to 100,000, and 25 percent above that. It takes 24 hours to activate, except for the one free instant switch you are offered when newbie protection ends. It does not protect an account that has gone seven days without a login.

PVE Mode is bought with credits and blocks player versus player entirely while it lasts, in both directions. NPC encounters and secret missions still work, so you can keep farming. It costs 15,000 credits for a day, 60,000 for a week or 160,000 for a month. Your production is untouched, which is the difference between this and Diplomacy.

Vacation Mode is the one for actually going away. Your production freezes, you are locked out of the universe, and you cannot be attacked. There is a 48 hour minimum stay, so it is not something you flip on because a fleet is inbound. Anything already launched at you before you switched it on still lands.

If you are going to be away for more than a few days and you have not set one of these up, you are relying on nobody noticing, and the seven day inactive rule means that bet gets worse every day.

Going out with a bang

Once you have the colonies you want, you can pick the moment protection ends instead of stumbling into it.

By this point every keeper planet should have a Capitol a few levels in, Shipyard 4, a Resource Den, and mines running off a Solar Array with a Nuclear Power Plant behind them. On the research side, chase unlocks rather than levels. Laser Tech 2 opens the Laser Cannon at Shipyard 2. Laser Tech 6 with Energy Tech 3 opens the Pulse Cannon at Shipyard 4. Particle Tech 4, which wants Research Lab 4, Laser Tech 5 and Energy Tech 4, opens the Particle Cannon at that same shipyard level. Research Lab 6 opens Shield Tech, and Shield Tech 2 opens the Decoy. Put a Missile Silo on your main planets and take it to level 2 so it can hold ABMs. If you can get one shipyard to 6 you also get the Gauss Cannon. The point is to have as many defenses unlocked as you can. Do not build them yet.

Let your RSP sit somewhere around 700 while the mines run and you keep doing missions. Stockpiled resources are worth zero RSP, so you can sit on an enormous pile without the number moving at all. When you are ready, spend it all in one go:

Start a long building upgrade on every planet, something that will still be running the next day.
Queue defenses on every planet, cheap ones first so the queue keeps working while you sleep.
Add ABMs anywhere you have a silo.
Send every ship you own out on a long fleet save.

You come out of protection with nine or ten planets, no loose resources, a Resource Den on each one, and a growing wall of guns. That is not a tasty target. You will get lit up by probes for a week while everyone in range checks you out, and then it stops, because the arithmetic does not work. From there you can let production climb again and play the game at whatever pace suits you.

See also: 8 rules to live by, battle tactics and plunder.