Laser Cannon

The Laser Cannon is the cheap body of an SFC2 defense. It costs 2,000 resources, it has 200 hull and it hits for 100. On its own it does nothing. Bought a thousand at a time it is one of the best walls in the game against the wrong attacker, and completely worthless against the right one. Which of those you get depends entirely on rapid fire.

You build it on the Defense page and it stays on that planet for good.

How its shots land

A shield in SFC2 is a pool, not a flat reduction. Shots drain it until it is empty, then the rest goes into hull. The shield refills at the start of every round, hull damage does not. That is why 100 attack is not as useless as it looks: two Laser Cannons strip an Athena's 400 shield and the third one onward hits hull. One Laser Cannon on its own would never scratch it.

Two other rules matter here. Any unit that has lost more than 30 percent of its hull can blow up at the end of a round it was hit in, at a chance equal to the share of hull it has lost. And a shot worth 1 percent or less of the target's full shield bounces off for nothing.

That second rule puts two targets permanently out of reach. A Zeus Class carries 50,000 shield, so anything under 500 bounces. A deployed Hephaestus carries 150,000, so anything under 1,500 bounces. A base Laser Cannon fires for 100 and every level of Weapons Tech adds another 10, so you would need Weapons Tech 40 before your shots even register on a Zeus, and by then the Zeus has research of its own. Laser Cannons never damage either of those two. Do not build them expecting to.

The three ships that rapid fire it

Rapid fire means the attacker gets to shoot again after it kills one, over and over, at the listed odds. Exactly three ships have it against the Laser Cannon:

Nothing else in the game does. That list is the whole story of this defense. Against the three ships on it, a Laser Cannon wall is money set on fire. Against everything else it is bodies, and bodies are what a wall is made of.

What 2,000,000 of Laser Cannon actually does

A thousand Laser Cannons costs 2,000,000 resources. Here is that wall against six raids, all with matching research on both sides, averaged over 30 runs of the live battle engine. The raids are worth more than the wall in every row.

Raid	What the raid cost	Result	Attacker lost	Cannons lost
150 Poseidon Cruisers	4,350,000	wall holds	all 150	373
100 Athena Battleships	6,000,000	wall holds	all 100	373
1,250 Artemis Fighters	5,000,000	planet falls	767 of 1,250	all 1,000
660 Apollo Fighters	5,610,000	planet falls	181 of 660	all 1,000
40 Prometheus Destroyers	5,000,000	planet falls	20 of 40	all 1,000
40 Ares Bombers	3,600,000	planet falls	16 of 40	all 1,000

The two rows it wins are the two raids made of ships with no rapid fire against it. Both of those raids are worth two to three times the wall and both die to the last hull.

That is one run of the Athena fight in the in-game Calculator. A hundred Athena Battleships walk into a thousand Laser Cannons, the fight goes the full six rounds, the raid loses all 6,000,000 of itself and the Plundered row is empty. The 1,800,000 debris on the board is all from the attacker's own wrecks, because defenses leave none.

Nothing else buys that

Same 2,000,000, spent on one defense at a time, against those two raids:

Wall	vs 150 Poseidon	vs 100 Athena
1,000 Laser Cannon	holds, kills all 150, loses 373	holds, kills all 100, loses 373
1,000 Missile Battery	falls, kills 9, loses all 1,000	draw, kills 80, loses 471
250 Pulse Cannon	falls, kills 67, loses all 250	falls, kills 2, loses all 250
250 Particle Cannon	draw, kills 83, loses 89	falls, kills 0, loses all 250
54 Gauss Cannon	falls, kills 55, loses all 54	falls, kills 10, loses all 54
15 Plasma Cannon	falls, kills 26, loses all 15	falls, kills 10, loses all 15

Read the Athena column. The Gauss and the Plasma are far better guns and they lose the planet anyway, because 54 and 15 of them is not enough bodies to survive six rounds. The Laser wall wins with the worst gun on the list purely by having a thousand hulls in the way. That is what cheap defense is for.

How many you need

The wall does not scale gently. Below a certain count it changes nothing at all, and a couple of hundred past that it wins outright. Same two raids, matching research:

Laser Cannons	Cost	vs 150 Poseidon	vs 100 Athena
100	200,000	falls, 0 killed	falls, 0 killed
200	400,000	falls, 0 killed	falls, 0 killed
400	800,000	falls, 5 killed	falls, 0 killed
700	1,400,000	draw, 143 killed	draw, 29 killed
1,000	2,000,000	holds, all 150 killed	holds, all 100 killed
1,500	3,000,000	holds, 273 lost	holds, 259 lost

Four hundred cannons against a Poseidon raid kill five cruisers and die to the last one. A thousand kill all 150 and keep 627 of themselves. Half a wall is not half as good, it is worthless. If you are going to build Laser Cannons, build the whole thousand.

Early game

Most Laser Cannons that ever get built are built early, when a hundred of them is real money and nobody has an Ares yet. It works there too. No research on either side:

Raid	100 Laser Cannon	200 Laser Cannon
30 Apollo Fighters	holds, loses 37	-
50 Apollo Fighters	draw	holds, loses 53
100 Artemis Fighters	holds, loses 57	-
200 Artemis Fighters	falls	holds, loses 115
20 Poseidon Cruisers	holds, loses 66	holds, loses 37

Laser Cannon or Missile Battery

The Missile Battery is 2,000 ore. The Laser Cannon is 1,500 ore plus 500 crystal. Same build resources, same build time, same 200 hull, and the crystal is the only thing that makes one dearer than the other. For that crystal you get 100 attack instead of 80, 25 shield instead of 20, and one thing that matters far more than either: the Poseidon Class Cruiser has rapid fire x10 against the Missile Battery and none at all against the Laser Cannon.

A hundred of each, no research, against the same three raids:

Raid	100 Laser Cannon	100 Missile Battery
30 Apollo Fighters	holds, loses 37	holds, loses 43
100 Artemis Fighters	holds, loses 57	draw, loses 91
20 Poseidon Cruisers	holds, kills all 20, loses 66	falls, kills none, loses all 100

That bottom row is the same 200,000 resources on both sides. One of them beats the raid off without losing a third of itself and the other is wiped out without killing a single cruiser. The 500 crystal is worth paying.

Do not stack it in front of a Gauss wall

Cheap defenses are usually good fodder: extra bodies soak shots that would otherwise land on the expensive guns. That is true for the Laser Cannon against most attackers and false against the one attacker people actually bring to knock a wall down.

An Ares Bomber has rapid fire x20 against the Laser Cannon. Every cannon it kills buys it another free shot, 19 times out of 20, and those extra shots land on your Gauss. Feeding an Ares raid Laser Cannons makes the wall worse. Same 2,000,000, against 40 Ares:

Wall	Result	Ares killed of 40
54 Gauss Cannon	draw in 27 runs of 30	33
40 Gauss + 250 Laser	planet falls	22
27 Gauss + 500 Laser	planet falls	19

It runs the other way against a Poseidon or Athena raid. There, mixing Gauss into a Laser wall turns an outright win into a draw, because you traded 500 bodies for 27 guns. Pick the wall for the raid you expect, do not average.

The Decoy and Large Decoy are the exception that always works. Nothing rapid fires either of them, so they add bodies to any wall without feeding anything.

Where you build it

Defense page, same as every other defense. The planet needs a Shipyard at level 2 and Laser Tech 2. That is the whole requirement list, and both are cheap enough that the Laser Cannon is one of the first defenses a new planet can build.

Laser Tech itself needs Research Lab 1 and Energy Tech 2, and you start with Energy Tech 3, so on a fresh account the only thing standing between you and Laser Cannons is a Research Lab and 900 resources of research.

The Defense page row shows Base next to Current so you can see what your research has done. Every level of Weapons Tech adds 10 attack, every level of Shield Tech adds 2.5 shield and every level of Armor Tech adds 20 hull. None of it compounds, it all works off the base number. The planet in the shot above is on Weapons, Shield and Armor 10, which is why 100 reads 200 and 200 reads 400.

Build time counts ore and crystal only, so the Laser Cannon is 2,000 build resources:

Time (hours) = 2,000 ÷ (5,000 × (Shipyard level + 1) × 2^{Foundry level})

That is 8 minutes each on a bare Shipyard 2, so a thousand of them is five and a half days. On the Shipyard 9 with a level 4 Foundry in the shot it is 9 seconds each, and the same thousand takes two and a half hours. If you want a wall, put the Shipyard up first.

A few more things worth knowing before you queue a thousand of anything:

Defenses do not use fields. There is no cap on how many a planet can hold beyond what you can pay for.
Ships and defenses share one build queue per planet, and you cannot cancel anything once it is in that queue.
You cannot start a defense while the Shipyard or the Foundry on that planet is upgrading.
There is no way to take a Laser Cannon back down. Deconstruct only exists for missiles.
A Shipyard cannot be built on a moon, so a moon never carries Laser Cannons.
Every Laser Cannon is 2 rank points. A thousand of them puts 2,000 points on your score, which is well past the 750 that ends newbie protection.

After the battle

Defenses leave no debris, so a raider who flattens your wall harvests nothing from it. On top of that, about 70 percent of everything of yours that was destroyed is rebuilt free the moment the battle ends. The battle report lists it under Regeneration.

Those are the two tables from the same report. Eighteen Laser Cannons died and fifteen came straight back, so the real bill was three cannons, 6,000 resources. That is what makes a cheap wall cheap: you pay list price once and roughly 30 percent of list price every time somebody hits it.

Two limits on that. The rebuild is a single roll on the total, not a coin flip per cannon, so on small losses it can come out a little above or below 70 percent. And it only covers fleet battles. Defenses killed by an Interplanetary Ballistic Missile are gone permanently.

One last thing in your favour: destroying defenses earns the attacker no Destroyed Ships Points. Somebody who spends a fleet clearing your Laser Cannons gets nothing on the leaderboard for it, and gets no plunder at all unless they clear the whole planet.

Cost

Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen
1,500	500	0

Stats

Attack	Shield	Hull
100	25	200

Rapid fire against it

Ship	Rating
Zeus Class	x200
Ares Class Bomber	x20
Prometheus Class Destroyer	x10

The Laser Cannon has no rapid fire of its own. No defense in SFC2 does.

Requirements

Shipyard (level 2)
Laser Tech (level 2)