Hull Rating

Hull Rating is how much punishment a unit can take before it dies. Every ship and every defense has one. When a shot gets past a unit's Shield Rating, whatever damage is left over comes off the hull.

Where the number comes from

Base Hull Rating is one tenth of the ore plus crystal it costs to build the unit. Hydrogen does not count toward it.

An Athena Class Battleship costs 45,000 ore and 15,000 crystal. That is 60,000 between them, so its base hull is 6,000.

The two units you buy with Credits instead of resources are the exception. The Shadow Probe has a fixed hull of 100 and the Genesis Solar Satellite has a fixed hull of 200.

Ships

Ship	Ore + Crystal	Base Hull
Hermes Class Probe	1,000	100
Helios Class Solar Satellite	2,000	200
Artemis Class Fighter	4,000	400
Atlas Class Cargo	4,000	400
Zagreus Class Recycler	8,000	800
Apollo Class Fighter	8,500	850
Hercules Class Cargo	12,000	1,200
Dionysus Class Recycler	16,000	1,600
Poseidon Class Cruiser	27,000	2,700
Gaia Class Colony Ship	30,000	3,000
Carmanor Class Cargo	36,000	3,600
Athena Class Battleship	60,000	6,000
Hades Class Battleship	70,000	7,000
Ares Class Bomber	75,000	7,500
Prometheus Class Destroyer	110,000	11,000
Zeus Class	9,000,000	900,000
Hephaestus Class Attack Platform	40,000,000	4,000,000
Shadow Probe	Credits only	100
Genesis Solar Satellite	Credits only	200

Defenses

Defense	Ore + Crystal	Base Hull
Laser Cannon	2,000	200
Missile Battery	2,000	200
Pulse Cannon	8,000	800
Particle Cannon	8,000	800
Anti-Ballistic Missile	8,000	800
Interplanetary Ballistic Missile	15,000	1,500
Decoy	20,000	2,000
Gauss Cannon	35,000	3,500
Plasma Cannon	100,000	10,000
Large Decoy	100,000	10,000

Armor Tech

Armor Tech adds 10% of the base hull for every level you research, and it does not compound. Level 1 gives you 110% of base, level 9 gives 190%, level 10 gives 200%. There is no cap.

The Shipyard shows both numbers. Base is the figure from the table above and Current is what you actually get with the Armor Tech you have. Here is the Athena at Armor Tech 9.

Defenses work exactly the same way. The Defense page shows the same two columns.

How hull works in a fight

A battle runs for at most six rounds. Every shot hits the target's shield first, and only what is left over comes off the hull.

Shields refill to full at the start of every round. Hull damage does not. That is why hull is worth more than shields in a long fight: hull is the one number that has to last all six rounds.

One kind of shot never reaches the hull at all. Anything worth 1% or less of the target's full Shield Rating is absorbed completely for zero damage. Combat has the full list of what bounces off what.

Blowing up

At the end of every round, any unit that took hull damage during that round rolls to see whether it survives. If it has lost more than 30% of its maximum hull over the battle so far, its chance of being destroyed is equal to the share it has lost. A unit sitting on zero hull is gone for certain.

Say a ship starts on 1,000 hull.

Round 1 it takes 250 damage and drops to 750. It has lost 25%, which is under 30%, so there is no roll and it survives.
Round 2 it takes another 100 and drops to 650. It has now lost 35% of its hull, so it has a 35% chance of being destroyed at the end of that round.
Round 3 nothing hits it. A unit that takes no hull damage in a round does not roll at all, however beaten up it is, so it survives that round for free.

The 30% is measured against your maximum hull with Armor Tech included. Incoming damage does not change when you research armor, but the share of your hull it represents gets smaller, so fewer of your ships pop after they have already lived through the shooting.

Nothing carries over

SFC2 does not track damaged ships. Hull damage only exists inside the battle it happened in. Anything that survives is back on full hull for the next fight, and there is nothing to repair and nothing to pay.

What hull costs

Because base hull is a flat one tenth of ore plus crystal, every unit that costs no hydrogen gives you the same deal: 100 hull for every 1,000 resources you spend. An Artemis and an Athena are identical on that measure.

Hydrogen buys no hull at all, so anything with a hydrogen price is worse per resource spent. The Hades gives 82 hull per 1,000 resources, the Plasma Cannon 77, the Gaia 75, and the Interplanetary Ballistic Missile only 60.

That flat rate is a big part of why fodder works. Fifteen Artemis cost the same 60,000 as one Athena and carry the same 6,000 hull between them, but shots pick their targets at random, so the Artemis are fifteen separate bodies soaking hits instead of one.

Missiles

Damage from an Interplanetary Ballistic Missile is not absorbed by shields at all. It goes straight onto the hull of the defenses it hits. Armor Tech still counts, so a planet with high armor eats more missiles per cannon it loses.

Test it yourself

The Calculator is the fastest way to see what hull is buying you. Both the attacker and defender boxes have an Armor Lvl field, so you can run the same fight twice and compare.

Here is one. Thirty Artemis on Weapons Tech 10 attacking forty Atlas Class Cargo. With the defender on Armor Tech 0 the attack kills all forty. Put the defender on Armor Tech 9 and the same attack leaves six to eight of them alive and the fight ends in a draw.