Prometheus Class Destroyer

The Prometheus Class Destroyer is the biggest warship you can put in a normal fleet. It hits for 2,000 and it has 11,000 hull, both of which are the highest numbers of any buildable ship apart from the Zeus and the Hephaestus, neither of which flies in a normal fleet. Its 2,000 cargo is the biggest hold of any warship, though the real cargo ships carry far more.

It is also slow, thirsty and expensive, and in a straight equal-cost fight it loses to almost everything. Two things keep it in the game. It has rapid fire on the Hades Class, which no other ship has, and it is the only normal warship that hits hard enough to hurt a Hephaestus. Build it for those jobs, not as a general purpose fleet ship.

Building one

Prometheus are built on the Shipyard page. You need Shipyard level 9, Warp Drive 6 and FTL Tech 5. That is two more Shipyard levels and two more Warp Drive levels than the Athena needs, so it lands well after your first real fleet.

The Base column is the ship as designed. The Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons Tech adds 10 percent of base attack per level, Shield Tech adds 10 percent of base shield and Armor Tech adds 10 percent of base hull. The commander above is running all three at 10, which turns 2,000 / 500 / 11,000 into 4,000 / 1,000 / 22,000. The speed reading of 17,000 is Warp Drive 8 on a 5,000 base.

Build time is 2:12:00 each at Shipyard 9 with no Foundry. The planet above, at Shipyard 9 and Foundry 4, turns one out every 8:15.

Every Prometheus that dies leaves 18,000 ore and 15,000 crystal in the debris field, the flat 30 percent of build cost that every ship leaves behind. The 15,000 hydrogen is gone for good, because debris is only ever ore and crystal. That is the real cost of a losing fight with these: a fifth of what you spent on each dead ship never comes back, even if you recycle every scrap.

What it costs

Compare ships by what they cost in one number, counting crystal at 1.67 ore and hydrogen at 2.5 ore. The Prometheus sits in the middle. It is better value than the Ares and the Hades and worse value than everything smaller.

Ship	Cost in ore	Per point of attack	Per point of hull
Apollo Class Fighter	10,167	68	12.0
Athena Class Battleship	70,000	70	11.7
Prometheus Class Destroyer	180,835	90	16.4
Poseidon Class Cruiser	36,667	92	13.6
Artemis Class Fighter	4,667	93	11.7
Ares Class Bomber	129,168	129	17.2
Hades Class Battleship	134,168	192	19.2

What the table does not show is that a Prometheus is one unit. Battles pick targets at random from every live unit on the other side, so 154 Prometheus give the enemy 154 things to shoot at while the same money in Artemis gives them 6,000. That is why the equal-cost fights below go the way they do.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire gives a ship a chance at another shot in the same round every time it hits a unit it has rapid fire against. The chance is (rating minus 1) divided by rating, so a rating of 10 is 90 percent, a rating of 5 is 80 percent and a rating of 2 is 50 percent.

The More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

The Prometheus rapid fires	Rating
Laser Cannon	x10
Genesis Solar Satellite	x5
Helios Class Solar Satellite	x5
Hermes Class Probe	x5
Shadow Probe	x5
Hades Class Battleship	x2

Rapid fires the Prometheus	Rating
Zeus Class	x5

Everything above the Hades on that list is a satellite, a probe or the cheapest turret in the game, which is another way of saying it does not matter. The Hades line is the one that does. It is the only rapid fire any ship in SFC2 has against a real warship that shoots back, and it belongs to the Prometheus.

The second list is one line long. Only the Zeus rapid fires a Prometheus, at x5, and almost nobody owns a Zeus.

The Hades matchup

This is what the ship is for. Both fleets below cost the same, about 28 million ore once crystal and hydrogen are converted, and both sides have Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10.

One hundred and fifty four Prometheus go in against 208 Hades. Every Hades dies in four rounds and the attacker loses four ships. Turn it around and send the 208 Hades at the 154 Prometheus and the result is the same: the Hades all die and one Prometheus goes with them. Nothing else in the game is that one-sided at equal cost.

The reason is the x2. A Prometheus that hits a Hades gets a second shot half the time, and 11,000 hull against the Hades' 700 attack means it takes a lot of hits to lose one. If you know an enemy fleet is Hades heavy, this is the answer.

Everything else beats it

Same settings, 154 Prometheus attacking, everything on the other side costing the same 28 million.

154 Prometheus against	Result
208 Hades	wins in 4 rounds, loses 1
216 Ares	runs out of rounds with about 2 Ares alive, loses about 56
400 Athena	every Prometheus dies in 5 rounds, about 167 Athena die
763 Poseidon	loses about 150 in 6 rounds, kills about 437
2,754 Apollo	every Prometheus dies in 4 rounds, about 427 Apollo die
6,000 Artemis	every Prometheus dies in 5 rounds, about 574 Artemis die

One win and five losses. The pattern is the same one that catches every expensive ship: cheap hulls beat big ones per resource spent, because the swarm has more bodies to soak shots and you do not. A Prometheus fleet with no fodder in front of it is a pile of money waiting to be shot.

Mixing cheap hulls in helps a lot. Half the money in Prometheus and half in Artemis against those 400 Athena keeps every Prometheus alive through all six rounds and kills nearly twice as many Athena, though it still does not win outright. Never send these alone.

Cracking defenses

The in-game description says the Prometheus can smash through enemy defenses. It can, but it is not the cheap way to do it. Here is a wall you might meet halfway through a universe: 500 Missile Batteries, 400 Laser Cannons, 200 Pulse Cannons, 150 Particle Cannons, 60 Gauss Cannons, 20 Plasma Cannons, 5 Large Decoys and 5 Decoys. That is 1,340 units.

Attacker	Result
154 Prometheus	runs out of rounds without clearing it, loses about 135
310 Prometheus	usually clears it on the sixth round, loses about 23
433 Ares (same spend as 310 Prometheus)	clears it in 3 rounds, loses about 17
800 Athena (same spend)	clears it in 5 rounds, loses about 47
5,508 Apollo (same spend)	clears it in 3 or 4 rounds, loses about 219

The x10 against Laser Cannons is the only rapid fire the Prometheus has against a wall, and lasers are the cheapest thing in it. The Ares has rapid fire against the turrets that actually hurt, which is why it clears the same wall in half the rounds for the same money.

Either way, remember that defenses leave no debris at all, and about 70 percent of destroyed defenses are rebuilt for free after every battle. Flattening a wall is how you get at a planet's resources. It never pays for itself.

Big targets

A shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all. That rule is what makes the Prometheus special, because at 2,000 attack it clears bars that nothing else can.

A Zeus Class has 50,000 shield, so anything hitting for more than 500 gets through. The Athena, Ares, Hades and Prometheus all qualify. About 100 Prometheus kill a lone Zeus in four rounds and lose around 20 doing it. Note the Zeus rapid fires the Prometheus at x5, so it gets a fresh shot 80 percent of the time.

A Hephaestus Class Attack Platform has 150,000 shield, so a shot has to land for more than 1,500. The Prometheus is the only ship on the normal build list that does. Athena, Ares and Hades all bounce off it forever. Twenty thousand Athena sat through all six rounds against one Hephaestus without either side losing a thing.

Prometheus sent at one Hephaestus	Result
100	damages it, cannot finish it inside six rounds
200	destroys it about 60 percent of the time
400	destroys it in 3 or 4 rounds, every time

You lose nothing doing it. A Hephaestus has no weapons of its own, so an unescorted one cannot shoot back at all. What it does have is 4,000,000 hull, which is why it takes hundreds of ships to chew through inside the six round limit.

The 1 percent rule uses both sides' research, and both Weapons Tech and Shield Tech move in 10 percent steps. Your weapons research has to fall about seven levels behind their shield research before your Prometheus start bouncing off a Hephaestus. With your Weapons at 10 they need Shield 17 to shut you out.

Speed and fuel

The Prometheus runs on Warp Drive from the day you unlock it and there is no engine swap to wait for. Warp Drive adds 30 percent of the 5,000 base per level, so Warp 6 is 14,000, Warp 8 is 17,000 and Warp 12 is 23,000.

That is half the speed of an Athena or a Hades at the same research, because they run the same engine off a 10,000 base. A fleet only moves as fast as its slowest ship, so adding Prometheus to a battleship fleet doubles every flight time it makes. Plan for that before you mix them in.

Flight times below are one way at 100 percent speed. The hydrogen column is what one Prometheus burns for the whole trip out and back.

Distance	Warp 6	Warp 8	Warp 10	Warp 12	Hydrogen
Same system, 1 slot away	24:48	22:31	20:46	19:22	115
Same system, 10 slots away	25:21	23:01	21:13	19:48	120
1 system away	41:18	37:29	34:34	32:15	320
5 systems away	44:01	39:57	36:50	34:22	363
10 systems away	47:11	42:50	39:30	36:50	418
25 systems away	55:37	50:29	46:33	43:25	580
50 systems away	1:07:22	1:01:09	56:23	52:35	852
1 galaxy away	1:50:20	1:40:08	1:32:19	1:26:06	2,286

Fuel is charged once when the fleet leaves and covers the trip out and back. Those numbers are for a fleet of nothing but Prometheus. Anything slower in the fleet drags the whole thing down to its speed, which changes both the times and the fuel.

A Prometheus burns 1,000 hydrogen per trip before distance is applied, the highest in the game alongside the Ares and the Gaia. Sending 154 of them one galaxy over costs 352,000 hydrogen before you have fired a shot. Holding one on a group defend costs 100 hydrogen an hour, twice what an Athena costs.

Carrying the loot

At 2,000 each, the Prometheus has the biggest hold of any warship in SFC2. A hundred of them carry 200,000 resources, so a Prometheus raid rarely needs cargo ships tagging along and slowing it down further. You take 50 percent of what is sitting on the planet, or 55 percent if your alliance is at war with theirs, minus whatever their Resource Den hides.

Only the surviving ships carry anything home, so a fleet that wins badly comes back half empty. Bring recyclers if you also want the debris.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Research Lab 7
Energy Tech 5
Shield Tech 5
FTL Tech 5
Shipyard 9
Warp Drive 6
Prometheus Class Destroyer