The Particle Cannon is the shield tank of SFC2 defense. It costs 8,000 resources, it hits for a weak 150, and it carries 500 shield. Nothing else on the Defense page comes close: the Gauss Cannon has 200 and the Plasma Cannon has 300, and both of those cost several times as much.
What that shield buys is simple. Most ships in the game cannot get through it in one shot, so most raids break on a Particle Cannon wall and lose everything. There is one exception, the Ares Class Bomber, and it is a big one.
You build it on the Defense page and it stays on that planet for good.
Why the shield matters so much
A shield in SFC2 is a pool, not a flat reduction. Shots drain it until it is empty and only the overflow reaches hull. The shield refills at the start of every round, hull damage does not.
A Particle Cannon's pool is 500. Exactly five ships in the game hit for more than that in a single shot:
- Hades Class Battleship, 700
- Athena Class Battleship, 1,000
- Ares Class Bomber, 1,000
- Prometheus Class Destroyer, 2,000
- Zeus Class, 200,000
Everything else has to gang up on the same cannon inside a single round or it does nothing at all. One Poseidon Class Cruiser fires for 400 and can shoot at a Particle Cannon all day without scratching it. Two Poseidons hitting the same cannon in one round put 300 into its 800 hull. Three kill it. One Apollo Class Fighter at 150 needs three friends on the same target before anything lands, and one Artemis Class Fighter at 50 needs ten.
There is a harder rule underneath that. A shot worth 1 percent or less of the target's full shield bounces off for nothing. One percent of 500 is 5, so both cargo hulls, every satellite and both recyclers can never damage a Particle Cannon no matter how many of them turn up.
Research works off the base numbers and does not compound. Every level of Shield Tech adds 50 shield, every level of Weapons Tech adds 15 attack and every level of Armor Tech adds 80 hull. The planet in the shot above is on Weapons, Shield and Armor 10, which is why 500 reads 1,000 and 800 reads 1,600.
Two ships rapid fire it
Rapid fire means the attacker gets to shoot again after it kills one, over and over, at the listed odds. Only two ships have it against the Particle Cannon: the Zeus Class at x100 and the Ares Class Bomber at x10.
That is a short list by defense standards, and it is most of the reason this wall performs. The Prometheus Class Destroyer rapid fires the Laser Cannon, the Poseidon Class Cruiser rapid fires the Missile Battery, and neither of them has anything at all against the Particle Cannon.
The Ares is the hole. It hits for 1,000, which goes straight through the 500 shield, and every cannon it kills buys it another free shot nine times out of ten. There are numbers for that further down and they are ugly.
The Strategy Tips on that panel are old SFC1 text and two of the claims no longer hold. The Particle Cannon costs exactly the same 8,000 as the Pulse Cannon, not more, and an Athena raid of equal value does not get through a Particle wall.
It can never hurt a Zeus
The bounce rule cuts the other way too. A Zeus Class carries 50,000 shield, so anything under 500 does nothing to it. A Particle Cannon fires for 150 and every level of Weapons Tech adds 15, so you would need Weapons Tech 24 before your shots even register on a Zeus with no research at all. Every level of the Zeus owner's Shield Tech pushes that further away: against a Zeus on Shield Tech 10 you would need Weapons Tech 57.
Run it and the cliff sits exactly where the arithmetic says. A thousand Particle Cannons on Weapons Tech 23 do literally nothing to one Zeus and lose 462 of themselves getting nowhere. The same thousand on Weapons Tech 24 kill it and lose 108.
A deployed Hephaestus Class Attack Platform carries 150,000 shield, which needs more than 1,500, which is Weapons Tech 91. Particle Cannons never touch one.
What 2,000,000 of Particle Cannon does
Two hundred and fifty Particle Cannons cost 2,000,000 resources. Here is that wall against seven raids worth about the same, with matching research on both sides, averaged over 30 runs of the live battle engine.
| Raid | What the raid cost | Result | Raid lost | Cannons lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 Artemis Fighters | 2,000,000 | wall holds | all 500 | none |
| 235 Apollo Fighters | 1,997,500 | wall holds | all 235 | none |
| 69 Poseidon Cruisers | 2,001,000 | wall holds | all 69 | 9 |
| 23 Hades Battleships | 1,955,000 | wall holds | all 23 | 5 |
| 33 Athena Battleships | 1,980,000 | wall holds | all 33 | 71 |
| 16 Prometheus Destroyers | 2,000,000 | wall holds | all 16 | 50 |
| 22 Ares Bombers | 1,980,000 | planet falls | 2 of 22 | all 250 |
Six wins and one wipe. No other defense in the game wins six of those rows for that money, and no other defense loses its row that badly.
That is the Hades row in the in-game Calculator. Twenty three Hades Class Battleships walk into 250 Particle Cannons, the raid loses all 1,955,000 of itself, the Plundered row is empty, and the wall is down nine cannons. The 483,000 debris on the board is all from the attacker's own wrecks, because defenses leave none.
Nothing else holds this cheaply
Holding is only half the question. What matters over a season is what it costs you to hold. Same 2,000,000 spent one defense at a time, same raids, and the number in each cell is the resource value of your own defense that was destroyed.
| Wall | 235 Apollo | 69 Poseidon | 23 Hades | 33 Athena | 22 Ares |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 250 Particle Cannon | holds, 3,000 | holds, 77,000 | holds, 43,000 | holds, 568,000 | falls |
| 250 Pulse Cannon | holds, 391,000 | holds, 469,000 | holds, 262,000 | holds, 544,000 | falls |
| 1,000 Laser Cannon | holds, 470,000 | holds, 201,000 | holds, 68,000 | holds, 99,000 | holds, 1,001,000 |
| 54 Gauss Cannon | draw, 1,089,000 | holds, 263,000 | holds, 106,000 | holds, 572,000 | holds, 263,000 |
| 125 Particle + 27 Gauss | holds, 15,000 | holds, 71,000 | holds, 35,000 | holds, 427,000 | holds, 1,096,000 |
Against fighters and against cruisers the Particle wall is the cheapest thing in the game to own. It kills 69 Poseidon Cruisers for 77,000 of damage; the same job costs a Gauss wall 263,000 and a Pulse wall 469,000. Against Athena Battleships it still holds but it is now paying, because 1,000 attack goes through 500 shield every time and a thousand cheap Laser hulls soak that better than 250 expensive ones.
Particle Cannon or Pulse Cannon
These two are the same price. Both are 8,000 resources, both have 800 hull, both take the same time to build. The Pulse Cannon has 250 attack and 100 shield, the Particle Cannon has 150 attack and 500 shield. In practice the shield wins nearly every fight.
| Raid | 250 Particle Cannon | 250 Pulse Cannon |
|---|---|---|
| 500 Artemis Fighters | holds, nothing lost | holds, 11,000 lost |
| 235 Apollo Fighters | holds, 3,000 lost | holds, 391,000 lost |
| 69 Poseidon Cruisers | holds, 77,000 lost | holds, 469,000 lost |
| 23 Hades Battleships | holds, 43,000 lost | holds, 262,000 lost |
| 33 Athena Battleships | holds, 568,000 lost | holds, 544,000 lost |
| 16 Prometheus Destroyers | holds, 398,000 lost | holds, 263,000 lost |
| 22 Ares Bombers | planet falls | planet falls |
The Pulse only comes out ahead where the shield is irrelevant, against the Prometheus. Everywhere else the Particle Cannon does the same job for a fraction of the repair bill, and neither of them stops an Ares.
The Pulse does win the shopping list, though. Both cost 8,000, but the Particle Cannon wants 2,000 ore and 6,000 crystal while the Pulse wants it the other way round. An Ore Mine produces half again what a Crystal Mine of the same level does, and ore gets a free 40 per hour trickle against crystal's 20, so 6,000 crystal takes noticeably longer to earn than 6,000 ore. If crystal is your bottleneck, that is a real cost the sticker price does not show.
How many you need
The wall does not scale gently. Below a certain count it changes nothing at all, and a hundred past that it wins outright. Same raids, matching research:
| Particle Cannons | Cost | vs 69 Poseidon | vs 23 Hades | vs 33 Athena |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 400,000 | falls, 0 killed | draw, 0 killed | falls, 0 killed |
| 100 | 800,000 | draw, 22 killed | draw, 1 killed | falls, 0 killed |
| 150 | 1,200,000 | draw, 65 killed | draw, 20 killed | draw, 9 killed |
| 200 | 1,600,000 | holds, 12 lost | holds, 9 lost | draw, 31 killed |
| 250 | 2,000,000 | holds, 9 lost | holds, 6 lost | holds, 71 lost |
| 400 | 3,200,000 | holds, 4 lost | holds, 2 lost | holds, 47 lost |
A hundred and fifty cannons against 69 Poseidon Cruisers kill 65 of them and still lose the field. Two hundred kill all 69 and keep 188 of themselves. Half a wall is not half as good, so if you are going to build Particle Cannons, build enough of them.
Early game
Shipyard 4 and Particle Tech 4 are not much account, so the Particle Cannon is available a lot earlier than most people build it, and 25 of them is real money at that stage. It works there too. No research on either side:
| Raid | 25 Particle Cannons | 50 Particle Cannons |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Apollo Fighters | holds, loses none | holds, loses none |
| 60 Apollo Fighters | draw, kills 19 | holds, loses none |
| 100 Artemis Fighters | draw, kills 67, loses none | holds, loses none |
| 250 Artemis Fighters | draw, kills 47, loses 17 | draw, kills 133, loses none |
| 20 Poseidon Cruisers | draw, kills 3, loses 20 | holds, kills all 20, loses 6 |
| 40 Poseidon Cruisers | planet falls | draw, kills 6 |
Fifty cannons is 400,000 resources and it turns off every fighter raid a newer player is likely to see.
Build Gauss Cannons alongside it
The Ares hole is real and it is easy to plug. The Gauss Cannon is the one wall an Ares raid cannot break, and mixing the two covers everything. Same 2,000,000, against the raid that beats a pure Particle wall and the raid a pure Gauss wall handles worst:
| Wall | vs 22 Ares Bombers | vs 69 Poseidon Cruisers |
|---|---|---|
| 250 Particle | planet falls, kills 2 | holds, 9 lost |
| 188 Particle + 13 Gauss | planet falls, kills 14 | holds, 9 lost |
| 125 Particle + 27 Gauss | holds, kills all 22 | holds, 8 lost |
| 62 Particle + 40 Gauss | holds, kills all 22 | holds, 9 lost |
| 54 Gauss | holds, kills all 22 | holds, 7 lost |
A straight 50/50 split by resources, which is about 125 Particle Cannons to 27 Gauss Cannons, holds every raid on this page. It is not the cheapest answer to any single one of them, but it is the only wall here with no hole in it. If you know an Ares fleet is coming, put the money in Gauss. If you have no idea what is coming, split it.
One warning about mixing. Particle Cannons make poor fodder in front of a Gauss wall, for the same reason Laser Cannons do. The Ares rapid fires them, so every one it kills buys another free shot at your Gauss, and the Ares fight gets more expensive the more Particle you add. The Decoy and Large Decoy are the exception that always works, because nothing rapid fires either of them.
Where you build it
Defense page, same as every other defense. The planet needs a Shipyard at level 4 and Particle Tech at level 4. That is the whole requirement list.
Particle Tech itself needs a Research Lab at 4, Laser Tech 5 and Energy Tech 4 first. Taking Particle Tech from nothing to level 4 costs 15,000 ore, 4,500 crystal and 1,500 hydrogen.
Build time counts ore and crystal only, so the Particle Cannon is 8,000 build resources:
Time (hours) = 8,000 ÷ (5,000 × (Shipyard level + 1) × 2Foundry level)
That is 19 minutes each on a bare Shipyard 4, so 250 of them is three days and eight hours. On the Shipyard 9 with a level 4 Foundry in the shot above it is 36 seconds each and the same 250 take 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 few hundred:
- 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 Particle Cannon back down. Deconstruct only exists for missiles.
- A Shipyard cannot be built on a moon, so a moon never carries Particle Cannons.
- Every Particle Cannon is 8 rank points. Ninety four of them puts you 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.
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, and gets them no plunder at all unless they clear the whole planet.
Cost
| Ore | Crystal | Hydrogen |
|---|---|---|
| 2,000 | 6,000 | 0 |
Stats
| Attack | Shield | Hull |
|---|---|---|
| 150 | 500 | 800 |
Rapid fire against it
| Ship | Rating |
|---|---|
| Zeus Class | x100 |
| Ares Class Bomber | x10 |
The Particle Cannon has no rapid fire of its own. No defense in SFC2 does.
Requirements
- Shipyard (level 4)
- Particle Tech (level 4)
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