Hades Class Battleship

The Hades Class Battleship is the specialist warship of SFC2. On paper it is bad value: it costs nearly twice an Athena and hits for 700 instead of 1,000. What you are paying for is rapid fire against almost everything people actually fly, including the Athena itself at x7.

Point a Hades fleet at Athena, Apollos, Poseidons or cargo and it wins fights it has no business winning on raw numbers. Point it at bombers, destroyers, cheap swarms or a defended planet and it burns money. Nothing else in the game swings this hard between those two cases.

Building one

Hades are built on the Shipyard page. You need Shipyard level 8, Warp Drive 5, FTL Tech 5 and Laser Tech 12. That is one step past the Athena on the ship line, but Laser Tech 12 is the part people forget. It is cheap per level and easy to leave sitting at 8 or 9 while you push the drives.

The Base column is the ship as designed. The Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons Tech adds 10 percent of base attack per level, Shield Tech adds 10 percent of base shield and Armor Tech adds 10 percent of base hull. The commander above is running Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10, which turns 700 / 400 / 7,000 into 1,400 / 800 / 14,000. The 34,000 speed reading is Warp Drive 8 on a 10,000 base.

Build time is 1:33:20 each at Shipyard 8 with no Foundry. The planet above, at Shipyard 9 and Foundry 4, turns one out every 5:15.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire gives a ship a chance at another shot in the same round every time it hits a unit on its list. The chance is (rating minus 1) divided by rating, so x7 is 86 percent, x5 is 80 percent, x4 is 75 percent, x3 is 67 percent and x2 is 50 percent. The extra shot can chain, so one Hades firing on Athena averages about seven shots a round instead of one.

The More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

The Hades rapid fires	Rating
Athena Class Battleship	x7
Genesis Solar Satellite	x5
Helios Class Solar Satellite	x5
Hermes Class Probe	x5
Shadow Probe	x5
Apollo Class Fighter	x4
Poseidon Class Cruiser	x4
Atlas Class Cargo	x3
Hercules Class Cargo	x3
Carmanor Class Cargo	x2

Rapid fires the Hades	Rating
Zeus Class	x15
Prometheus Class Destroyer	x2

That is the whole ship in two tables. Every mainstream fleet ship and every cargo hull is on the first list. Nothing on the second list is common, but the Prometheus at x2 is the one that ends Hades fleets, and there is more on that below.

Two things the first list does not include: the Artemis, and any planet defense at all. Both of those gaps decide fights.

What it costs

Compare ships by what they cost in one number, the way the game itself does when it sorts the Shipyard: crystal counts as 1.67 ore and hydrogen as 2.5 ore. The Hades is the worst combat ship in the game on both efficiency measures.

Ship	Cost in ore	Per point of attack	Per point of hull
Apollo Class Fighter	10,167	68	12.0
Athena Class Battleship	70,000	70	11.7
Prometheus Class Destroyer	180,833	90	16.4
Poseidon Class Cruiser	36,667	92	13.6
Artemis Class Fighter	4,667	93	11.7
Ares Class Bomber	129,167	129	17.2
Hades Class Battleship	134,167	192	19.2

An Athena brings almost three times the firepower per resource. If rapid fire did not exist the Hades would be unbuildable. Rapid fire does exist, and against the right target it is worth far more than the gap in the table.

One cost that does not show up there: 15,000 of the price is hydrogen, and hydrogen never comes back. Debris is a flat 30 percent of the ore and crystal only, so a dead Hades leaves 9,000 ore and 12,000 crystal and takes 15,000 hydrogen with it. A dead Athena costs you nothing permanently. Every Hades you lose is 15,000 hydrogen gone for good.

Against an Athena wall

This is what the ship is for. Both fleets below cost the same, about 28 million ore once crystal and hydrogen are converted, and both sides are at Weapons, Shield and Armor 10. Two hundred and eight Hades attack four hundred Athena.

Three rounds, every Athena dead, and the Hades fleet comes home having lost 109 of 208. That is a fleet worth 28 million wiped out for about 14.6 million spent, and the attacker picks up 9.5 million in debris on top if they bring recyclers.

The Athena side cannot fix this with research, because your research climbs at the same rate as theirs. It can only fix it with fodder, which is exactly what the Hades side should be doing too.

Always bring fodder

Targets in a battle are picked at random from every live enemy unit. Cheap hulls in your own fleet soak shots that would otherwise land on your Hades, and a Hades at 134,167 ore is the most expensive thing in the game to leave standing in the open.

Same 28 million, same 400 Athena on the other side, but now half the money goes into Artemis: 104 Hades and 2,990 Artemis.

Four rounds, every Athena dead again, and this time not one Hades dies. The losses are about 890 Artemis. Net result is 4.7 million ahead instead of 0.2 million ahead, off the same spend against the same enemy.

Attacking 400 Athena with 28 million	Result
208 Hades	wins in 3 rounds, loses about 100 Hades
104 Hades + 2,990 Artemis	wins in 4 rounds, loses no Hades and about 890 Artemis

Artemis are the right screen because they are the cheapest hull in the game and because the Hades has no rapid fire against them, which means the enemy's Hades will not chew through your screen either.

The same logic runs the other way. If you are defending against Hades, screen with Artemis. Put 200 Athena behind 2,990 Artemis and an equal-cost Hades fleet cannot get at the Athena at all: six rounds go by, the Hades fleet loses more screen than it kills, and no Athena dies. Rapid fire only helps when it hits something on the list.

Where it loses

Same test, 208 Hades attacking, everything on the other side costing the same 28 million.

208 Hades against	Result
400 Athena	wins in 3 rounds, loses about 100
763 Poseidon	wins in 5 rounds, loses about 80
1,744 Hercules	kills all of them and loses nothing
2,754 Apollo	every Hades dies, about 1,700 Apollo die
6,000 Artemis	every Hades dies, about 700 Artemis die
216 Ares	runs out of rounds, loses 206 and kills about 20
154 Prometheus	every Hades dies in 4 rounds, 0 to 4 Prometheus die

The Prometheus line is not a typo. A Prometheus hits for 2,000 with 500 shield and 11,000 hull, and it rapid fires the Hades at x2. An unscreened Hades fleet does essentially nothing to it. The Ares result is nearly as bad for the same reason: 500 shield and 7,500 hull, no rapid fire either way, and the Hades is paying 192 per point of attack to grind it down.

Against the cheap swarms the problem is different. The Hades has rapid fire on the Apollo at x4, but 2,754 Apollo throw enough shots per round to strip an 800 shield and start on the hull, and there are simply too many bodies to shoot. The Artemis is not on the rapid fire list at all, so 6,000 of them beat a Hades fleet outright.

Fodder narrows all of these. The 104 Hades plus 2,990 Artemis mix runs the Prometheus fight to six rounds and kills about 130 of the 154 while losing one or two Hades, and it kills about 100 Ares instead of 20. It still does not win either fight, but it stops being a total loss.

Do not send it at defenses

The Hades has zero rapid fire against planet defenses. Not a reduced rating, none at all. Against a wall it is a 134,167 ore ship hitting once a round for 700.

Here is a wall you might meet halfway through a universe: 500 Missile Batteries, 400 Laser Cannons, 200 Pulse Cannons, 150 Particle Cannons, 60 Gauss Cannons, 20 Plasma Cannons, 5 Large Decoys and 5 Decoys. That is 1,340 units. Every attacker below spends the same 56 million.

417 Hades	runs out of rounds with the wall still standing, loses about 90
800 Athena	clears it in 5 rounds, loses about 50
433 Ares	clears it in 3 rounds, loses about 20

The Hades is the only one of the three that cannot finish the job. Send Ares at walls, or Athena if that is what you own. Bring Hades along only to handle the fleet sitting on top of the wall.

Worth remembering either way: defenses leave no debris at all, and about 70 percent of destroyed defenses are rebuilt for free after every battle. Flattening a wall is how you reach a planet's resources. It never pays for itself.

Speed and fuel

The Hades starts on Warp Drive and stays there, so there is no engine upgrade to wait for. Warp Drive adds 30 percent of the 10,000 base per level: Warp 5 is 25,000, Warp 8 is 34,000 and Warp 12 is 46,000. That ties it with the Athena for the fastest heavy ship in the game, and only the Poseidon and the Artemis beat it outright.

Flight times below are one way at 100 percent speed. The hydrogen column is what one Hades burns for the whole trip out and back.

Distance	Warp 5	Warp 6	Warp 8	Warp 12	Hydrogen
Same system, 1 slot away	18:35	17:34	15:57	13:43	29
Same system, 10 slots away	19:00	17:57	16:18	14:02	30
1 system away	30:56	29:14	26:32	22:50	80
5 systems away	32:58	31:09	28:17	24:19	91
10 systems away	35:20	33:24	30:19	26:04	105
25 systems away	41:39	39:22	35:44	30:44	145
50 systems away	50:26	47:40	43:16	37:13	213
1 galaxy away	1:22:35	1:18:03	1:10:50	1:00:55	572

Fuel is charged once when the fleet leaves and covers the round trip. Those numbers are for a fleet of nothing but Hades. Anything slower drags the whole fleet down to its speed, which changes both the times and the fuel, so an Ares or a Prometheus in the mix costs you a lot more than it looks.

At 250 hydrogen a trip the Hades is the cheapest heavy ship to fly, half an Athena and a quarter of an Ares. Holding one on a group defend costs 25 hydrogen an hour, again half an Athena. Sending 208 of them one galaxy over costs about 119,000 hydrogen. That is genuinely useful when your fleet lives away from home, and it partly offsets the hydrogen you lose every time one dies.

Carrying the loot

At 750 each the Hades has half the cargo room of an Athena. A 208 ship fleet holds 156,000 resources, which is not enough to empty a developed planet. If you are raiding for resources rather than for kills, bring cargo ships or mix in Athena.

You take 50 percent of what is sitting on the planet, or 55 percent if your alliance is at war with theirs, minus whatever their Resource Den hides. Only surviving ships carry anything home, and bring recyclers if you also want the debris.

The flip side is that the Hades is very good at killing cargo. It rapid fires the Atlas and Hercules at x3 and the Carmanor at x2. Twenty Hades sitting over a planet will kill close to two hundred Hercules without losing a single ship.

Big targets

A shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all, and a shot that bounces gets no rapid fire either.

A Zeus Class has 50,000 shield, so the bar is 500 and a Hades clears it at 700 even with no research. Twenty thousand Hades kill a Zeus in the first round and lose about 20 doing it. The Zeus rapid fires the Hades at x15, which is a fresh shot 93 percent of the time, but it only gets the one round.

The Hephaestus Class Attack Platform is a different story. At 150,000 shield the bar is 1,500, and a Hades at Weapons 10 is still only hitting for 1,400. Twenty thousand Hades sat through all six rounds against one Hephaestus without either side losing a single ship. The owner's Shield Tech raises that bar as fast as your Weapons Tech raises your attack, so this does not get better. Hades do nothing to a Hephaestus.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Research Lab 7
Energy Tech 5
Shield Tech 5
FTL Tech 3
Shipyard 8
Warp Drive 5
FTL Tech 5
Laser Tech 12
Hades Class Battleship