Large Decoy

The Large Decoy is a defense with no gun on it. It is the big version of the Decoy: 10,000 shield and 10,000 hull, five times the Decoy's numbers for five times the price. You build it on the Defense page and you can only have one per planet.

What it does in a battle

The shield soaks up damage until it runs out, and only then does the hull start taking hits. At the start of every round the shield goes back to full, so a base Large Decoy eats up to 10,000 damage every round for nothing. Hull damage is the only thing that carries from one round to the next.

Nothing in the game has rapid fire against the Large Decoy. That is worth more than it sounds. A ship with rapid fire keeps picking a fresh random target and firing again until it rolls something it has no rapid fire against, so the moment an Ares or a Zeus hits the Large Decoy, that chain ends for the round.

There is a second way it breaks chains. Any shot worth 1 percent or less of a unit's shield bounces off and does nothing at all, and a bounced shot ends a rapid fire chain too. A base Large Decoy has 10,000 shield, so any shot of 100 or less simply does not register.

One more thing that gets missed. An attack only counts as a win, and only pays plunder, if every unit on the defending side is gone by the end of round six. The Large Decoy is one more body that is very hard to remove, so it drags attacks that would have been clean wins back to a draw.

Where to build it

Defense page, same as the rest of your defenses. The planet needs a Shipyard at level 6 and you need Shield Tech at level 6. The row shows Base next to Current so you can see what your research has done to it. The Large Decoy above sits on a planet with Shield Tech 10 and Armor Tech 10, which is why 10,000 shield and 10,000 hull both read 20,000.

Every level of Shield Tech adds 1,000 to the shield and every level of Armor Tech adds 1,000 to the hull. Both are 10 percent of the base number and neither of them compounds.

Build time runs off the same formula as ships, which means the Foundry matters far more than the Shipyard does. Every Foundry level halves it.

Shipyard	Foundry	Build time
6	none	2h 51m
6	2	43m
8	4	8m 20s
10	6	1m 42s
12	8	22s

One per planet

Once yours is finished the Build button turns into Max Reached. Anything sitting in the build queue counts as well, so you cannot slip a second one in behind the first. A moon is its own planetoid, so a moon with a Shipyard on it carries its own Large Decoy separately.

There is no way to take one back down again. Deconstruct only exists for missiles, so once it is up it stays up.

The Decoy is counted separately. Building one does not block the other, so a planet can hold one of each.

Small guns cannot touch it

That is 5,000 Artemis Fighters on Weapons Tech 10 sent at a planet holding nothing but a single Large Decoy, with the defender on no Shield Tech at all. Six rounds, draw, not one unit lost on either side. The attacker paid 31,943 hydrogen for the trip and went home with nothing.

That is the bounce rule doing all of the work. An Artemis hits for 50, which is under 1 percent of 10,000. Weapons Tech 10 doubles that to 100, and 100 is exactly 1 percent, so it still bounces. An Artemis needs Weapons Tech 11 before it can put a mark on a Large Decoy that has no Shield Tech whatsoever.

Raise your own Shield Tech and the line moves up with it, because the bounce threshold is always one hundredth of the current shield.

Shield Tech	Shield	Shots this size or smaller do nothing	Attacking ships that bounce off it
0	10,000	100	Artemis
5	15,000	150	Artemis, Apollo
10	20,000	200	Artemis, Apollo
30	40,000	400	Artemis, Apollo, Poseidon

Those last two columns assume the attacker has no Weapons Tech of their own. Weapons Tech raises the attack by 10 percent of base per level, so it is a race between their Weapons and your Shield.

How much it takes to kill one

Here is where the line sits for each attacking ship against a lone Large Decoy, with the attacker on no Weapons Tech and the defender on no Shield or Armor Tech.

Attacking ship	Never gets through	Always kills it
Artemis Fighter	any number at all	never
Apollo Fighter	69 or fewer	78
Poseidon Cruiser	26 or fewer	30
Hades Battleship	14 or fewer	17
Athena Battleship	10 or fewer	12
Ares Bomber	10 or fewer	12
Prometheus Destroyer	5 or fewer	6

In between those two columns is a band where it dies some of the time. Any unit that has lost more than 30 percent of its hull can blow up at the end of a round it took a hit in, even with hull left, which is why 16 Hades kill a Large Decoy on most runs but not all of them.

The Decoy dies to 3 Athena. The Large Decoy needs 12. It costs five times as much and soaks about five times as much, so per resource spent the two are a wash. The bounce threshold is the real reason to want the big one: five times the shield means five times the size of shot that gets ignored outright.

Is it worth 100,000?

The old complaint about it is fair as far as it goes. It has no attack, and it does not pull fire, because every shot in a battle picks its target at random out of everything you have. Once you are sitting on a few hundred turrets the odds of any one shot landing on the Large Decoy are small.

What it does do is refuse to be the last one standing. Here is a wall of 100 Missile Battery, 50 Laser Cannon, 30 Pulse Cannon, 20 Particle Cannon and 10 Gauss Cannon, both sides on Weapons, Shield and Armor 5, against a raid of Athena. The number is the chance the raid clears the planet and gets to plunder.

Athena in the raid	No decoys	Decoy only	Large Decoy only	Both
55	8%	3%	0%	0%
60	80%	56%	1%	0%
65	99%	98%	27%	12%
70	100%	100%	82%	67%
75	100%	100%	100%	98%

That wall costs a bit over a million in ore and crystal. The Large Decoy adds 100,000 to the bill, under a tenth of it, and on its own it pushes the raid you need from around 60 Athena to around 70. It will not save you from someone who has properly outgrown you. It does punish anyone who turns up with just barely enough.

Missiles go straight through the shield

Do not count on that shield against Interplanetary Ballistic Missiles. Missile damage ignores shields completely, so all 10,000 of it counts for nothing there. Only the hull matters, hardened by your Armor Tech.

One missile does 12,000 damage, plus 10 percent per level of the attacker's Weapons Tech. So a single missile on no Weapons Tech kills a base Large Decoy outright. At Armor Tech 10 the hull is 20,000 and it takes two.

The saving grace is the targeting order. Missiles eat the cheapest defenses first unless the attacker names a priority target, and only the Plasma Cannon is worth more than the Large Decoy, so it sits near the back of the queue.

After the battle

Defenses leave no debris in SFC2, so nothing the attacker kills on the ground can be recycled afterwards. Killing it earns the attacker no points either, because destroyed ship points only count ships.

On top of that, about 70 percent of everything of yours that was destroyed is rebuilt for free the moment the battle ends, and the Large Decoy is in that pool. The battle report lists what came back under Regeneration. For a single Large Decoy that works out at roughly a 7 in 10 chance it is standing again before you have finished reading the report.

Building one puts 100 points on your score, the same as any other 100,000 you spend.

Cost

Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen
50,000	50,000	0

Stats

Attack	Shield	Hull
0	10,000	10,000

Requirements

Shipyard (level 6)
Shield Tech (level 6)