Gaia Class Colony Ship

The Gaia Class Colony Ship is the only way to add a planet in SFC2. You build it at the Shipyard, point it at an empty slot from the Galaxy page, and it turns into a colony the moment it lands. The ship does not come home. It is spent making the planet.

Everything else it does is a side job. It carries 7,500 of cargo, it has a small gun, and it can travel with any fleet. But 40,000 resources for 3,000 hull is a poor deal in every role except the one it was built for, so most commanders build one, use it, and build the next one when they want another planet.

Building one

You need Shipyard 4 and Pulse Drive 3. Pulse Drive itself wants Research Lab 2 and Energy Tech 1.

You land with Capitol 2, Shipyard 3, Research Lab 1, Energy Tech 3 and Jet Drive 3, so the gap between a new homeworld and a first colony ship is one Shipyard level, one Research Lab level and three levels of Pulse Drive. Pulse Drive doubles in price every level, which is where most of the bill is:

Pulse Drive level	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	Total
1	2,000	4,000	600	6,600
2	4,000	8,000	1,200	13,200
3	8,000	16,000	2,400	26,400
1 to 3	14,000	28,000	4,200	46,200

The ship itself is 10,000 ore, 20,000 crystal and 10,000 hydrogen. That is 40,000 all in, and it is one of the few ships that costs more crystal than ore, so plan your Crystal Mine around it.

Build time is worked out from ore plus crystal only, so the 10,000 hydrogen costs you nothing in queue time. It is then divided by Shipyard level plus one and halved again for every Foundry level:

Shipyard	Foundry	Time for one Gaia
4	0	1h 12m
4	2	18:00
6	3	06:26
9	4	02:15

The Base column on the Shipyard page is the ship as designed, the Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons, Shield and Armor Tech each add 10 percent a level to attack, shield and hull, and Pulse Drive adds 20 percent a level to speed. Cargo capacity and fuel consumption never move.

Claiming a slot

Open the Galaxy page and look for a row with nothing in it. The flag icon in the Actions column is Colonize. If you have no Gaia anywhere, or no free fleet slot, the icon is greyed out and the tooltip tells you which.

Hover the icon before you click it. SFC2 tells you up front roughly how big the planet will be. Fields are rolled from the slot position, so slot 4 in any system is a much better bet than slot 2, and the tooltip spells that out.

Slot	Typical fields	Base temperature
1	73 to 105	90°C
2	68 to 98	90°C
3	84 to 112	90°C
4	146 to 250	65°C
5	142 to 242	65°C
6	133 to 227	65°C
7	140 to 198	40°C
8	138 to 192	40°C
9	154 to 214	40°C
10	104 to 148	0°C
11	105 to 141	0°C
12	108 to 152	0°C
13	102 to 168	-45°C
14	84 to 134	-45°C
15	96 to 156	-45°C

Every roll also has a 16 percent chance of ignoring the typical range and coming out somewhere between 245 and 320 fields instead. That wildcard is the same on every slot, so a bad slot is never hopeless, it is just unlikely.

Temperature matters too. The Hydrogen Synthesizer produces more on a cold planet and less on a hot one, and solar satellites work the other way round. Slots 13 to 15 are the hydrogen slots.

Clicking the flag opens the Colonization dispatch panel.

Four things to know about that screen:

The Gaia has to be sitting on the planet you are launching from. The galaxy icon lights up if you have one anywhere in your empire, but the dispatch panel only offers ships parked on the current planet, so deploy it across first if it is on the wrong world.
Colonization allows cargo, and it is the cheapest way to give a new colony a start. Anything you load is delivered to the new planet.
Fuel comes out of the hold, not out of the planet on top. In the shot above a single Gaia shows 7,382 of capacity rather than 7,500, and the missing 118 is the hydrogen for the trip.
The trip takes one fleet slot, held until the fleet lands. There is no return leg to wait on when it works.

You can also start the same mission from the Fleets page by picking Colonization and typing the coordinates.

What arrives

The colony report tells you what you got. New planets are named Planet 2, Planet 3 and so on in the order you settle them. The Rename button on the Overview page fixes that.

A new colony starts with 500 ore and 500 crystal, no buildings, no mines and no defenses. Whatever cargo you sent is added on top of that, which is why it is worth filling the hold.

Anything else in the colonization fleet is stationed at the new planet, not sent home. In the report above the 25 Apollo and 10 Atlas that travelled with the Gaia are now parked on the new colony. That is a handy way to seed a colony with a hauler or two, but it is also easy to strand a fleet somewhere undefended by accident.

The report lists the Gaia itself at a quantity of 0. That is not a bug in your fleet, it is the ship being spent. It is gone and it does not come back if you later abandon the planet.

Ten planets

You can hold 10 planets at once. The planet bar shows the ones you have and a greyed out Colony marker for every slot you have not filled yet, so you always know how many are left. Moons and a deployed Hephaestus do not count against the ten.

Abandoning a planet frees a slot, but it destroys everything on it, including any ships parked there and the moon at that same slot. It does not give you a Gaia back, so re-colonizing means building another one.

When it does not work

The dispatch panel blocks most mistakes before you launch:

Destination slot is already occupied. Colonize means an empty slot. A slot holding a planet, a moon or a platform is not available. An NPC encounter is not a planet, so a slot with an encounter parked in it can still be colonized.
You have reached the maximum limit of 10 planets.
Cannot colonize locations in the secret zone, and Colony ships cannot be sent to secret locations. Secret mission space is off limits to Gaia ships entirely, even as passengers in another fleet.
A colony ship is required for colonization. The fleet has to contain at least one Gaia.

Two things can still go wrong after launch, because they are checked again on arrival. If somebody else colonized the slot while you were in flight, or you hit the ten planet cap in the meantime, you get a Colonization Failed report and the whole fleet turns around and flies home with the Gaia and the cargo intact.

Recalling

A colonization fleet can be recalled from the Fleets page like any other mission. It flies back for as long as it had been flying out.

You get everything back. The Gaia lands on your planet again, and every unit of ore, crystal and hydrogen in the hold is returned. The only thing you lose is the fuel, which is charged in full when the fleet leaves and is not refunded. The in-game tip that says recalling loses all the hydrogen you sent is left over from the old game and does not match what SFC2 actually does.

Speed and fuel

The Gaia runs on the Pulse Drive and never swaps engines. Base speed is 2,500, and every Pulse Drive level adds 20 percent of that:

Pulse Drive	Gaia speed
3 (the minimum)	4,000
5	5,000
8	6,500
10	7,500
12	8,500
15	10,000

That is slow. The only things with a lower base speed are the Dionysus recycler, the Zeus and the Hephaestus. A fleet travels at the pace of its slowest ship, so a Gaia riding along with warships drags the whole group down.

Fuel consumption is 1,000, the top rate in the game alongside the Ares and the Prometheus. A single Gaia crossing 2,890 distance units at 100 percent speed burned 716 hydrogen with 10 Atlas and 25 Apollo alongside it, and 331 on its own. Longer hops across galaxies get expensive fast, so it is usually worth colonizing near home unless the slot is genuinely better.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire gives a ship a chance at another shot in the same round every time it hits something it has rapid fire against. The More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

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

Rapid fires the Gaia	Rating
Zeus Class	x250

The four things it rapid fires are probes and satellites, which is a polite way of saying it rapid fires nothing that matters. The list pointing the other way is short, and that is the whole basis of the old trick of using a Gaia as a shield for better ships. No other ship and no defense has rapid fire against it.

Before you spend it

A Gaia sitting in your hangar is an ordinary ship. It can join a transport, a deploy, an attack, a harvest, a fleet save or a group defend. Only sending it to an empty slot uses it up.

Its 7,500 hold counts as plunder capacity on a raid, which is more than an Atlas carries, so tucking one into a raid is not silly if it is going that way anyway. On a group defend it costs 100 hydrogen an hour to hover, the same as an Ares or a Prometheus, so leaving one parked over an ally is expensive.

As a fight buffer the numbers do not hold up. 3,000 hull and 100 shield is a little more hull than a Poseidon and half of an Athena, for 40,000 resources. Two runs through the in-game Calculator, 100 Apollo attacking with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides, against equal cost fodder:

Defender	Cost	Result
10 Gaia	400,000	all dead in 2 rounds, attacker loses nothing
100 Artemis	400,000	all dead in 4 rounds, attacker loses nothing

Same money, and the Artemis soak an extra round. Buy fodder with fodder.

One last thing worth knowing: your rank score counts the ships you have now, not the ones you have ever built. A Gaia is worth 40 points while it is parked, and those 40 points come off again the moment it turns into a planet. A small dip in your score right after you colonize is normal.