Hermes Class Probe

The Hermes Class Probe is the spy ship in SFC2. It has no gun, no shield and 100 hull, and it is the fastest thing in the game by a very long way. Point a few at somebody's planet and a report on what is sitting there lands in your inbox about a minute later. Espionage covers how those reports work.

At 1,000 crystal it is also the cheapest unit in the game, cheaper than a Laser Cannon. That is why probes turn up in places that have nothing to do with spying: as fodder in a raid on a defended planet, as a very fast little freight train, and as ammunition for a moon shot.

Getting your first probes

Every new commander lands with two Hermes already parked on the homeworld, plus Shipyard 3 and Jet Drive 3. That covers two of the three requirements, so the only thing standing between a fresh account and a probe factory is Espionage Tech 2, which itself needs Research Lab 3.

Espionage Tech is cheap. Level 1 is 200 ore, 1,000 crystal and 200 hydrogen and every level after that doubles, so 600 ore, 3,000 crystal and 600 hydrogen buys you level 2 and unlocks the ship.

The probe itself is 1,000 crystal and nothing else. It is the only ship in the game with a one resource price tag, so a probe habit is a crystal habit.

Build time comes off ore plus crystal only, divided by Shipyard level plus one, then halved again for every Foundry level. Probes are quick even on a starting Shipyard:

Shipyard	Foundry	One probe	100 probes
3	0	3m 00s	5h 00m
5	0	2m 00s	3h 20m
7	2	23s	37m 30s
9	4	5s	7m 30s

The Base column on the Shipyard page is the ship as designed and the Current column is what your research has done to it. For a Hermes the only line that ever moves is Hull, from Armor Tech, and Speed, from Jet Drive. Weapons and Shield Tech multiply a 0 and stay a 0.

Spying with them

There are three ways to launch a spy run: the eye icon in the Actions column of the Galaxy page, the Espionage mission on the Fleets page, and the eye icon on an Oracle scan result. The probes have to be sitting on the planet you launch from, and the run holds a fleet slot until they get home.

Espionage is probe only. Nothing else can ride along, and you cannot mix Hermes with a Shadow Probe in the same run.

You get the report even when the probes are shot down. What you lose is the ships, and the wreckage becomes a debris field over the target that the target can harvest, so a big failed spy run is a present. How much of the report you can read comes down to the probe count and the tech gap, and that is all set out on Espionage. The short version is that against someone on your own Espionage Tech level seven probes buys the whole report, and from Espionage Tech 3 up a single probe returns everything on an NPC encounter.

Speed and fuel

Base speed is 100,000,000. An Athena does 10,000, so a probe is ten thousand times faster off the mark. Every Jet Drive level adds 10 percent of the base on top, and unlike the Atlas the Hermes never swaps to a better engine, so Jet Drive is the only thing that touches it.

The speed is so far past everything else that more Jet Drive barely registers:

Jet Drive	Same system	Five systems over	Next galaxy	Two galaxies
3	21s	33s	1m 14s	1m 43s
6	19s	30s	1m 07s	1m 33s
10	18s	28s	1m 01s	1m 24s
14	17s	26s	56s	1m 17s

Fuel consumption is 1, the lowest in the game. The game works out a fraction of a unit for each ship and rounds the total once at the very end, so a small run is almost free:

Probes	Inside your own system	To the next galaxy
1	1	3
10	2	27
100	14	262
1,000	133	2,618

A fleet travels at the speed of its slowest ship, so probes never slow anything down, and they cost almost nothing to bring along. Adding 800 probes to a raid of 150 Apollo across 2,795 distance added 65 hydrogen to the bill and not one second to the flight.

Cargo

Each probe has a 5 unit hold. Fuel comes out of that hold rather than off the planet on top of it, so on a long trip the probes eat their own capacity.

2,400 probes is 12,000 of capacity on paper. Sent to another planet in the same system that is 11,721 after fuel. Sent to the next galaxy the trip burns 5,486 hydrogen and only 6,514 is left for freight. For comparison an Atlas hauls 5,000 for 4,000 resources, while 1,000 probes haul 5,000 for 1,000,000 crystal. Probe ferries are for when you already own the probes and you want the resources there inside a minute, not for hauling.

Two rules catch people out:

Probes cannot plunder. Their hold is left out of the loot calculation entirely, so an attack made only of probes brings nothing home even when it wins. The Hephaestus is the same.
Attacks cannot carry cargo at all, for any ship. The hold only does anything on transport, deploy, colonization, harvest and fleet save.

In a fight

Attack 0, shield 0, hull 100. Armor Tech adds 10 percent of the base hull per level, so Armor 10 puts a probe on 200 hull. That is it. A Hermes never damages anything.

Every armed ship in the game has rapid fire against the Hermes, and so does every hauler, both recyclers and the colony ship:

Rapid fires the Hermes	Rating
Zeus Class	x1250
Apollo Class Fighter	x5
Ares Class Bomber	x5
Artemis Class Fighter	x5
Athena Class Battleship	x5
Atlas Class Cargo	x5
Carmanor Class Cargo	x5
Dionysus Class Recycler	x5
Gaia Class Colony Ship	x5
Hades Class Battleship	x5
Hercules Class Cargo	x5
Poseidon Class Cruiser	x5
Prometheus Class Destroyer	x5
Zagreus Class Recycler	x5

The Hermes has no rapid fire of its own against anything. The five things that do not have rapid fire against it are the Helios, the Genesis, the Shadow Probe, the Hephaestus and other Hermes. More importantly, no defense in the game has rapid fire against anything at all, and that is the whole basis of the next section.

Fodder

Because the defense grid has no rapid fire, a probe is the cheapest body you can put in front of it. Shots in SFC2 pick their target at random, so every shot a Laser Cannon spends on a 1,000 crystal probe is a shot it did not spend on an Athena.

Measured against 121 Laser Cannon and 140 Pulse Cannon on a planet with no ships, attacker on Weapons 9, Shield 8 and Armor 11, averaged over 15 runs:

Attacking fleet	Apollo lost	Probes lost	Resources lost
400 Apollo	35.5	0	301,750
400 Apollo + 500 Hermes	10.1	190	275,850
400 Apollo + 1,500 Hermes	2.1	295	312,750

A screen of probes really does cut warship losses hard. But probes are not free, and past a point you are only buying probes in order to lose them. The 1,500 probe run saves almost every Apollo and still ends up costing more than sending no fodder at all. Somewhere around one probe per warship is where it stops paying.

The other half of the bill is what you leave behind. Ships turn 30 percent of their cost into debris and defenses leave none, so every probe you lose over a defended planet is 300 crystal dropped in a field above the defender's own planet for them to harvest at their leisure. Their dead defenses are not gone either: 70 percent of them are rebuilt for free the moment the battle ends.

That run sent 150 Apollo and 800 Hermes at the 121 Laser Cannon and 140 Pulse Cannon above. The probes soaked up 620 of the losses and only 31 Apollo died, but the defender collected 265,050 of debris and 868 Destroyed Ships Points out of it. The attacker scored 0, because destroyed defenses are worth no points.

Moon shots

A moon is rolled off the total debris a battle leaves, and it forms at the defender's planet. The chance is the total debris divided by 15,000,000, capped at 20 percent, and nothing is rolled at all if the number comes out under 1 percent.

A probe leaves 300 crystal, so in probes:

Probes destroyed	Debris	Moon chance
500	150,000	1 percent, the smallest roll the game will take
2,500	750,000	5 percent
5,000	1,500,000	10 percent
10,000	3,000,000	20 percent, the cap

Ten million crystal for one 20 percent roll is why moon shots get traded between friends instead of bought. The moon appears at the defender's slot, so the probes fly at the planet that wants the moon and the owner shoots them down. Three things have to be true: the slot must not already have a moon, the defender has to be a real planet and not an NPC encounter, and it has to be a battle. Probes shot down by counterespionage on a spy run leave their debris but never roll for a moon.

Points, quests and draws

Your rank score counts what you own right now, not what you have ever built, at 1 point per 1,000 resources. A Hermes is exactly 1 point, and the point disappears with the probe. A stack of 2,000 probes is 2,000 points of score that any defended planet can delete in six rounds.

Three quests ask only that you hold probes: Don't Shoot the Messenger I, II and III, at 5, 50 and 200 Hermes, paying out resources each time.

The light tier of the Lucky Draw also hands out Hermes in ones, threes and fives, which is where a lot of a new player's first probes come from.

When you are the one being probed

Counterespionage counts every ship parked on the target planet, and probes are ships. A pile of Hermes sitting at home makes other people's spy runs against you riskier, and it costs nothing to leave them there. An empty planet can never shoot a probe down, which is why a fleet saved planet can be probed for free.

Probes are also free to lend out. On group defend a Hermes hovers at 0 hydrogen an hour, where an Apollo costs 7 and a Gaia costs 100.