Missile Battery

The Missile Battery is the cheapest thing you can put on a planet in SFC2. It costs 2,000 ore, no crystal and no hydrogen. It has 200 hull, 20 shield and hits for 80. One of them does nothing at all. A thousand of them will wipe out a five million resource fleet, or die without scratching a smaller one, and which of those you get comes down entirely to rapid fire.

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

Note: the Missile Battery has nothing to do with the Missile Silo. It does not need one, and it does not take up slots in one. Only the Interplanetary Ballistic Missile and the Anti-Ballistic Missile use silo slots.

It is available from your first day

The Missile Battery needs a Shipyard at level 1 and nothing else. No research, no other building. You start the game with a Shipyard at level 3, so the only thing between a brand new account and its first Missile Battery is 2,000 ore.

That is the real reason to build it. The Laser Cannon costs the same 2,000 in total but 500 of it is crystal, and early on crystal is the resource you never have enough of. An Ore Mine also out-produces a Crystal Mine at the same level, so ore is what piles up while you are waiting on everything else.

How its shots land

A shield in SFC2 is a pool, not a flat reduction. Shots drain it until it is empty and the rest goes into hull. The shield refills at the start of every round, hull damage does not carry over. With 20 shield the Missile Battery may as well have none, so it is 200 hull and that is it.

Two other rules matter. 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 bounce 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. The Missile Battery fires for 80 and every level of Weapons Tech adds another 8, so you would need Weapons Tech 53 before your shots even register on a Zeus. Both sides scale together in practice, so the answer never changes: Missile Batteries never damage a Zeus or a Hephaestus. A single Zeus walked into 5,000 of them in the battle engine, killed about 1,400 and took zero damage over the full six rounds.

The three ships that rapid fire it

Rapid fire means the attacker gets another shot every time it kills one, over and over, at the listed odds. Exactly three ships have it against the Missile Battery:

Nothing else in the game does. That list is the whole story of this defense, and the odd one out on it is the Poseidon. It is a cheap early cruiser that most people can field long before they can field an Ares, and it eats Missile Batteries for free.

What 2,000,000 of Missile Battery actually does

A thousand Missile Batteries costs 2,000,000 ore. Here is that wall against six raids, matching research on both sides, averaged over 30 runs of the live battle engine. Every raid is worth more than the wall.

Raid	What the raid cost	Result	Attacker lost	Batteries lost
40 Prometheus Destroyers	5,000,000	wall holds	all 40	145
100 Athena Battleships	6,000,000	draw	81 of 100	470
1,250 Artemis Fighters	5,000,000	planet falls	527 of 1,250	all 1,000
660 Apollo Fighters	5,610,000	planet falls	105 of 660	all 1,000
150 Poseidon Cruisers	4,350,000	planet falls	10 of 150	all 1,000
40 Ares Bombers	3,600,000	planet falls	4 of 40	all 1,000

The top row is the one to build for. Forty Prometheus Destroyers is five million resources of the heaviest regular warship in the game and it dies to the last hull against two million of the worst defense in the game, because no Prometheus has rapid fire against a Missile Battery and 1,000 hulls is more shots than 40 ships can take.

The bottom two rows are the same wall against ships that do have rapid fire. A hundred and fifty Poseidons lose ten of themselves and take the planet. Forty Ares lose four.

That is the Prometheus fight as it comes through in the battle report. Five rounds, 141 batteries dead, 282,000 ore, and the whole 5,000,000 raid gone. Look at the Destroyed Ships Points row: the attacker earned zero. Killing defenses is worth nothing on the leaderboard. Look at the debris too. All 1,320,000 of it came off the attacker's own wrecks, because defenses leave none.

Missile Battery or Laser Cannon

Same 2,000 build cost, same 200 hull, same build time. The Laser Cannon costs 500 of that in crystal and gives you 100 attack instead of 80 and 25 shield instead of 20. The stats are not what decides it. The rapid fire lists are:

The Poseidon rapid fires the Missile Battery x10 and the Laser Cannon not at all.
The Prometheus rapid fires the Laser Cannon x10 and the Missile Battery not at all.
The Ares rapid fires both x20. The Zeus rapid fires both x200.

Same six raids, 1,000 of each, matching research:

Raid	1,000 Missile Battery	1,000 Laser Cannon
40 Prometheus	holds, kills all 40, loses 145	falls, kills 19, loses all 1,000
150 Poseidon	falls, kills 10, loses all 1,000	holds, kills all 150, loses 373
100 Athena	draw, kills 81, loses 470	holds, kills all 100, loses 370
1,250 Artemis	falls, kills 527	falls, kills 773
660 Apollo	falls, kills 105	falls, kills 182
40 Ares	falls, kills 4	falls, kills 17

Read the top two rows. They are the same 2,000,000 on both sides and they trade places completely. The Laser Cannon is the better buy overall, because it wins three rows to one and because the Poseidon is cheaper and far more common than the Prometheus. The Missile Battery wins the one row that costs the attacker the most.

If you cannot afford the crystal, build Missile Batteries and do not feel bad about it. If you can, build Laser Cannons, or build both so that neither rapid fire list covers your whole wall.

How many you need

The wall does not scale gently. Below a certain count it changes nothing, and a couple of hundred past that it wins outright. Same 40 Prometheus and 40 Ares raids, matching research:

Missile Batteries	Cost	vs 40 Prometheus	vs 40 Ares
100	200,000	falls, 0 killed	falls, 0 killed
250	500,000	draw, 0 killed	falls, 0 killed
500	1,000,000	draw, 0 killed	falls, 0 killed
750	1,500,000	draw, 33 killed	falls, 0 killed
1,000	2,000,000	holds, all 40 killed, 146 lost	falls, 4 killed
1,500	3,000,000	holds, all 40 killed, 103 lost	holds, all 40 killed, 1,287 lost

Five hundred batteries against a Prometheus raid kill nothing and lose 229 of themselves for it. A thousand kill all forty and keep 854 of themselves. Half a wall is not half as good, it is worthless. If you are going to build Missile Batteries, build the whole thousand.

The Ares column is the warning. It takes 3,000,000 of batteries to beat a 3,600,000 Ares raid and you lose 1,287 of them doing it. That is rapid fire x20 at work. Against an Ares fleet this is not a wall, it is a queue.

Early game

Most Missile Batteries that ever get built are built early, when a hundred of them is real money and nobody has an Ares yet. No research on either side:

Raid	100 Missile Battery (200,000 ore)
30 Apollo Fighters	holds, kills all 30, loses 43
50 Apollo Fighters	falls, kills 25
100 Artemis Fighters	draw, kills 88, loses 90
200 Artemis Fighters	falls, kills 22
20 Poseidon Cruisers	falls, kills none, loses all 100

A hundred batteries stops the small fighter raids that make up most early attacks. The bottom row is the one that will actually happen to you the first time somebody serious notices your planet, and there is no amount of Missile Battery that fixes it.

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 works for the Missile Battery against most attackers and backfires against the two people actually bring to break a wall.

An Ares has rapid fire x20 against it and a Poseidon has x10. Every battery they kill buys them another free shot, and those extra shots land on your Gauss Cannons and Plasma Cannons. Feeding a Poseidon or Ares raid Missile Batteries makes the wall worse, not better.

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.

Missile strikes eat it first

An Interplanetary Ballistic Missile that gets past your Anti-Ballistic Missiles works through your defenses cheapest first, valuing crystal at double and hydrogen at triple. The Missile Battery scores 2,000 on that scale, the lowest number in the game, so it is always the first thing a missile strike destroys unless the attacker names a different priority target.

Missile damage ignores shields but Armor Tech still hardens the hull. One IBM does 12,000 damage and a battery has 200 hull, and both numbers scale by 10 percent per level, so when the attacker's Weapons Tech matches your Armor Tech the answer is always the same: 60 Missile Batteries per missile. A Missile Silo at level 5 holds 25 missiles, and that is 1,500 batteries gone in one strike.

Worse, defenses killed by a missile strike do not come back. The 70 percent rebuild below only applies to fleet battles.

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 report lists it under Regeneration.

In the fight above, 141 batteries died and 90 came straight back. The real bill was 51 batteries, 102,000 ore, to destroy a 5,000,000 resource fleet. 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.

The rebuild is a single roll on the total, not a coin flip per battery, so on small losses it lands a bit above or below 70 percent. Ninety out of 141 is 64 percent, which is a normal result.

One more thing in your favour. Destroying defenses earns the attacker no Destroyed Ships Points, and no plunder at all unless they clear the whole planet.

Build time and the small print

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

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

Shipyard	Foundry	Each	1,000 of them
3	0	6m 00s	100 hours
5	0	4m 00s	67 hours
8	3	20s	5h 33m
10	5	4.1s	1h 08m
12	8	0.4s	7 minutes

Six minutes each on the Shipyard you start with means a thousand of them is over four days. Put the Shipyard and the Foundry up before you plan a wall.

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 Missile Battery back down. Deconstruct only exists for missiles in the silo.
A Shipyard cannot be built on a moon, so a moon never carries Missile Batteries.
Every Missile Battery is 2 rank points. Three hundred and seventy five of them puts you past the 750 that ends newbie protection, so a big early wall can be what makes you attackable.

The Defense page row shows Base next to Current so you can see what your research has done. Every level of Weapons Tech adds 8 attack, every level of Shield Tech adds 2 shield and every level of Armor Tech adds 20 hull. None of it compounds, it all works off the base number.

Quests

Four quests pay you for building these:

Quest	Build	Reward
Missile Mayhem I	1	800 ore, 460 crystal, 240 hydrogen
Missile Mayhem II	25	2,000 ore, 10,000 crystal
Missile Mayhem III	500	46,900 ore, 59,400 crystal, 53,700 hydrogen
Missile Mayhem IV	5,000	863,000 ore, 466,200 crystal, 70,800 hydrogen

None of them pay for the batteries. Missile Mayhem II wants 50,000 ore of them and hands back 12,000 resources. Treat the rewards as a top-up on a wall you were building anyway, not a reason to build one.

Cost

Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen
2,000	0	0

Stats

Attack	Shield	Hull
80	20	200

Rapid fire against it

Ship	Rating
Zeus Class	x200
Ares Class Bomber	x20
Poseidon Class Cruiser	x10

The Missile Battery has no rapid fire of its own. No defense in SFC2 does.

Requirements

Shipyard (level 1)