Interplanetary Ballistic Missiles

Interplanetary Ballistic Missiles (IBMs) are the standoff weapon in SFC2. You fire them at another player's planet and they destroy that planet's defenses. They never touch ships, buildings or resources, and they cannot take a planet. Stripping the defenses is the whole job, usually so a fleet can follow in behind them.

You build IBMs on the Defense page and they sit in the Missile Silo on that planet, two silo slots each. A missile is used up the moment you fire it.

Launching a strike

Strikes go out from the Galaxy screen. Find the target's row and click the rocket icon in the action column. The icon only appears if the planet you are currently on holds missiles, and it is greyed out with "Target out of missile range" if the target is too far.

That opens the Missile Strike screen. It shows the distance and the flight time, lets you pick how many missiles to send, and lets you pick one priority target. Nothing is committed until you press Launch Strike.

A few things worth knowing before you press it:

• Missiles cannot be recalled. Once they are away they are gone.
• A strike does not use a fleet slot, so you can send one while every fleet you own is already out.
• Missiles only fly inside their own galaxy. You cannot shoot from galaxy 1 into galaxy 2 no matter how much Pulse Drive you have.
• Several planets can fire at the same target at once. Each strike resolves on its own when it arrives.
• Completed strikes count toward the missile strike quests.

What the missiles hit

Missiles work down the defense list from the cheapest unit to the most expensive one, and they keep going until the damage runs out. Cost here means the resource value of the unit, not how tough it is, so the order is always the same:

1. Missile Battery
2. Laser Cannon
3. Pulse Cannon
4. Particle Cannon
5. Decoy
6. Interplanetary Ballistic Missile
7. Gauss Cannon
8. Large Decoy
9. Plasma Cannon

If you set a priority target, that one type is attacked first. Anything left over after it is wiped out falls back to the normal cheapest-first order.

Note where IBMs sit in that list. Missiles parked in a silo are a legal target for someone else's missiles, so an unprotected stockpile can be shot off the planet before you ever use it. Ships cannot do that. A fleet battle only ever touches defensive weapons, so IBMs and ABMs sit out every attack and can only be removed by a missile strike.

Damage

Each missile carries 12,000 damage, plus 10 percent for every level of Weapons Tech the attacker has. Weapons Tech 10 makes it 24,000, Weapons Tech 20 makes it 36,000.

Shields are ignored completely. Only hull matters. But the defender's Armor Tech does count, exactly the same way it does in a fleet battle: every unit's hull is raised by 10 percent per level. A Gauss Cannon has 3,500 hull on paper, but against a defender sitting on Armor Tech 10 it takes 7,000 damage to kill. Both sides of the sum move, so a missile count that flattened someone last month may not flatten them now.

Damage does not carry over between strikes. Anything a unit soaks without dying is wasted, and the unit is back at full hull for the next one.

Anti-Ballistic Missiles

The defender's ABMs fire on their own as soon as a strike arrives. One ABM kills one incoming missile before it does any damage at all. Only the missiles that get past the ABMs deal damage, and they are the ones that count when you work out how many you need to send.

ABMs take one silo slot to an IBM's two, so the defender always gets more cover per level of silo than the attacker gets missiles. Firing from a single planet, you need a silo more than twice the defender's level before anything lands. Firing from several planets at once is the usual way around that.

What nobody gets

• Defenses killed by missiles are gone for good. There is no 70 percent rebuild the way there is after a fleet battle.
• Nothing leaves debris. Not the defenses, not the missiles, not the ABMs that shot them down. There is no salvage in the exchange for either side.
• Missiles never take resources. If you want the loot you still have to send a fleet.
• Missile strikes do not count toward bashing, so they do not burn an attack slot on the target.

Missiles sitting in your silo do count toward your rank points, so a strike that wipes out a stockpile drops the owner's score along with it. See Leaders.

The defender sees it coming

A strike in flight shows up on the defender's Overview and Fleets pages as a red Missile Strike bar with the attacker's coordinates, the number of missiles and a countdown. Launching also marks the target planet as active in the Galaxy view. There is no way to fire quietly.

When the strike lands, both sides get a message. The defender gets the full report: missiles sent, ABMs used, missiles that got through and a table of everything destroyed.

The attacker only gets a one line note saying the strike completed. It does not say how many ABMs the target was holding or what died, so if you want to know whether it worked you have to spy the planet again afterwards.

Who you can hit

Plenty of targets are off limits, and the game checks all of this at launch rather than on arrival:

• Not your own planets.
• Not a player whose rank is too far from yours. Newbie protection covers missiles the same as it covers fleets.
• Not a player in vacation mode. A strike already in flight when they park still lands.
• Not a player protected by diplomacy mode, and you cannot fire at all while you are in it yourself.
• Not while PvE mode blocks the pairing.
• Not a Hephaestus platform. Platforms cannot own defenses, so a strike on one would do nothing.
• Not an NPC, unless your alliance has bought the Siege Missile Codes perk, and even then only against Trivial and Easy signatures.
• Not from a planet that has just been moved. Moving puts the planet on a cooldown that blocks launching.

Firing at a moon is allowed but pointless. A moon cannot build a Shipyard, so it never has any defenses for the missiles to destroy. The strike lands, the report says nothing was destroyed, and the missiles are spent. The same happens if the target planet is abandoned or destroyed while your missiles are still in the air.

Range

Range comes from Pulse Drive only:

(5 x Pulse Drive level) - 1 = solar systems

Range is measured across solar systems inside one galaxy. Slot numbers do not matter, so hitting 1:4:1 and 1:4:15 from 1:4:8 costs the same. Galaxy borders are hard walls.

Pulse Drive	Systems in range
1	4
2	9
3	14
4	19
5	24
6	29
7	34
8	39
9	44
10	49
11	54
12	59

Flight time

Flight time is 15 seconds inside your own solar system, plus 30 seconds for every system the missiles cross. Every SFC2 universe runs at the same speed, so these numbers are the same everywhere.

Distance	Flight time
Same system	0:15
1 system	0:45
5 systems	2:45
10 systems	5:15
20 systems	10:15
39 systems	19:45

Building and storing them

IBMs are built on the Defense page along with everything else. The planet needs a Shipyard, the missile needs a Missile Silo at level 4 or higher, and you need Pulse Drive level 1. Build time drops as the Shipyard and Foundry go up, the same as any other defense.

The silo holds 10 slots per level and an IBM takes two of them. A level 4 silo is 40 slots, so 20 missiles. A level 10 silo is 100 slots, so 50. The Silo line under the missile shows how full you are, and the Max figure is how many more you can fit and afford right now. Missiles that are queued or still building already count against the silo, so the number can be lower than you expect.

The Missile Silo is a planet building. Moons cannot have one, so a moon never carries missiles of either kind.

To free up slots, open the Defense page, click More Info on the Interplanetary Ballistic Missile and use the Deconstruct Missiles box at the bottom. It happens straight away and you get nothing back, so only scrap missiles you are sure you do not want.

Cost

Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen
12,500	2,500	10,000

Requirements

• Shipyard on the planet
• Missile Silo level 4
• Pulse Drive level 1