An SFC2 universe is a flat map with two dimensions. It is built out of galaxies, galaxies are built out of solar systems, and every solar system has fifteen planet slots. Everything in the game happens on that grid, and every distance in the game is measured across it.
A galaxy holds 300 solar systems. The live universe runs three galaxies today, which works out to 13,500 planet slots. More galaxies get opened when the map fills up, so the universe grows with the player base.
Not every slot is taken. Some hold a player planet, some hold an NPC encounter, some hold a debris field left over from a battle, and most are empty and free to settle.
Coordinates
Every slot has an address made of three numbers separated by colons: the galaxy, the solar system inside that galaxy, then the slot number inside that system.
Galaxy:System:Slot
A planet in galaxy 1, system 2, slot 8 sits at 1:2:8. If that planet has a moon, the moon shares the same slot and gets an m on the end: 1:2:8m. A moon is a separate target with its own buildings and its own fleets, so that m matters when you are picking somewhere to send ships.
Planets
You start with one planet, your homeworld. Homeworlds always get 163 fields and always land somewhere between slot 4 and slot 13, so nobody starts on a tiny rock at the edge of a system. Everything else you own you have to go and take: colonies you settle with a colony ship, and moons that form out of debris after a big battle.
You can hold up to 10 planets. Moons do not count against that limit, so a full empire is 10 planets plus up to 10 moons.
The Planet panel on the Overview page is where you manage the one you have selected. It shows the coordinates, the temperature range, fields used out of fields total, how many fleet slots you have in the air, and whether newbie protection or diplomacy mode is on.
Rename and Abandon are the two buttons underneath. Names can be up to 30 characters and duplicates are allowed, so nothing stops you calling every colony the same thing. The pencil button on the planet picture swaps the artwork for another image. To change the order your planets appear in along the top bar, open Settings and use the Gameplay section. Whichever planet sits first in that order counts as your homeworld.
Temperature
Temperature comes from the slot number. Slots near the sun are hot, slots at the far end of a system are cold, and each planet rolls a few degrees either side of the base for its slot. The panel shows a range because a planet has a low and a high, and the low is always 40 degrees under the high.
Temperature does two things. Hot planets get more energy out of Helios and Genesis solar satellites. Cold planets get more hydrogen out of the Hydrogen Synthesizer. Neither effect is dramatic on its own, but across a whole colony it adds up, so it is worth a thought before you settle.
Fields
Fields are the space a planet has to build on. Every level of every building takes one field. Defenses do not use fields, and neither does research. When the fields run out you cannot upgrade anything else on that planet until you free some up with Teardown or buy more with Terraform.
How many fields a new colony gets depends on which slot you settle. Every slot has a typical range. There is also about a one in six chance the roll comes out high instead and lands anywhere from 245 up to the hard cap of 320. The colonize icon on the Galaxy page tells you the numbers for that exact slot before you commit anything.
The table below is the whole picture. Temperatures are the base for the slot, and individual planets vary by a few degrees.
| Slot | Typical fields | Temperature |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 73 to 105 | 50 to 90°C |
| 2 | 68 to 98 | 50 to 90°C |
| 3 | 84 to 112 | 50 to 90°C |
| 4 | 146 to 250 | 25 to 65°C |
| 5 | 142 to 242 | 25 to 65°C |
| 6 | 133 to 227 | 25 to 65°C |
| 7 | 140 to 198 | 0 to 40°C |
| 8 | 138 to 192 | 0 to 40°C |
| 9 | 154 to 214 | 0 to 40°C |
| 10 | 104 to 148 | -40 to 0°C |
| 11 | 105 to 141 | -40 to 0°C |
| 12 | 108 to 152 | -40 to 0°C |
| 13 | 102 to 168 | -85 to -45°C |
| 14 | 84 to 134 | -85 to -45°C |
| 15 | 96 to 156 | -85 to -45°C |
Slots 4, 5 and 6 are the ones worth chasing. They are the biggest on average and they are warm, which suits satellites. Slots 1, 2 and 3 are small and hot, and mostly end up as cheap staging planets. No planet is ever smaller than 40 fields or larger than 320.
Terraform
Terraform buys five more fields with credits. You will find it on the Buildings page in the panel on the left, and in the Store. The price climbs as the planet gets bigger, so rescuing a small colony is cheap and pushing a big one past 300 is not.
| Fields on the planet now | Cost of +5 fields |
|---|---|
| Under 100 | 5,000 |
| 100 to 149 | 7,500 |
| 150 to 199 | 10,000 |
| 200 to 249 | 15,000 |
| 250 to 299 | 30,000 |
| 300 to 319 | 60,000 |
320 fields is the ceiling. A planet already at 320 cannot be terraformed at all, and moons cannot be terraformed.
Colonies
A colony is a new planet you settle with a Gaia Class Colony Ship. Build one in the Shipyard, then either click the flag icon on an empty slot on the Galaxy page, or start a Colonization mission from the Fleets page and type the coordinates in yourself.
The Gaia is used up making the colony. Anything else you sent along with it stays parked at the new planet, and any cargo you loaded gets dropped into the new planet's storage, which is the easy way to give a colony a starting kick. If somebody settles the slot before your fleet lands, or you are already holding 10 planets, the whole fleet turns round and comes home with the Gaia still in it.
Colonies start with nothing. No buildings, no mines, no ships. They do share your research, because research is empire wide and is not held on any one planet. A new colony is named Planet 2, Planet 3 and so on until you rename it.
Where to settle. Colonies close together are easy to defend and easy to pool resources between. Colonies spread out give you more systems within reach, which means more targets. Most players end up with a cluster plus one or two outposts a long way off, and use a Hephaestus Class Attack Platform when they want to hunt somewhere new without moving house.
If you do not like the size of a colony you just settled, you can abandon it and try the slot again.
Abandoning
Abandoning a planet deletes it for good. Everything on it goes with it: buildings, defenses, stored resources, ships sitting in orbit, and anything it was building or researching. The slot goes back to being empty and anyone can settle it.
Two things catch people out. If the planet has a moon, the moon is destroyed along with it and everything on the moon goes too. And you cannot abandon a planet that has fleets parked on it or fleets out in the air, so move your ships somewhere else first and wait for anything in flight to land.
You also cannot abandon your last remaining planet. Past that there is no restriction, so you can abandon a homeworld as long as you still own something else.
To do it, select the planet, open Overview and press Abandon. The warning lists exactly what you are about to lose, and you have to type ABANDON followed by the planet's name before the button will work. Research is never lost this way.
Galaxy Screen
The Galaxy page shows one solar system at a time. Type a galaxy and a system and press Go, or step through with the arrows. Home jumps back to the system your selected planet is sitting in. Looking around is free and there is no limit on it.
One thing to keep in mind: everything you do from this page comes from the planet you have selected in the top bar. If you probe, attack or send cargo from the Galaxy page, the ships leave that highlighted planet. Switch planets first if you meant to launch from somewhere else.
The columns
- Slot is the position in the system, 1 to 15. Moons are listed under their planet with a small arrow, and NPC encounters are listed under whichever slot they are sitting in.
- Planet is the name, plus an activity marker if the owner has been on that planet recently.
- Debris shows the ore and crystal floating in that slot, if there is any.
- Player is the owner's name and their rank. The rank number is colored: blue means you are stronger, red means they are stronger, gray means you cannot attack them at all.
- Status holds the protection and inactivity letters. The legend below covers them.
- Alliance is the owner's alliance tag. Click it to open the alliance page.
- Actions is everything you can do to that slot.
Rows are tinted so you can read a system at a glance. Amber is yours, blue is an alliance mate or a buddy, green is an NPC encounter.
Activity
The marker beside a planet name tells you when the owner last had that planet selected. (*) means within the last 15 minutes. A number like (20m) means that many minutes ago. After an hour the marker disappears.
Two things worth knowing about it. It only tracks the owner looking at the game with that planet selected, so ships landing on a planet do not light it up. And players on vacation never show a marker at all.
Actions
Which icons you get depends on what is in the slot and on what you have built.
- Colonize on an empty slot. Hover it and it tells you the field range for that slot before you send anything.
- Spy and Quick Spy send probes. Quick Spy sends the number you set in Settings in a single click.
- Attack opens the fleet builder for an attack.
- Defend sends ships to sit over an alliance mate or a buddy for anywhere from 1 to 24 hours, then come home on their own. See Group Defend.
- Missile Strike shows up once you have interplanetary missiles built. It greys out when the target is out of range, and it never appears on a Hephaestus platform, because a platform has no defenses for a missile to hit.
- Transport and Deploy move ships and cargo. Transport goes to somebody else, Deploy goes between your own planets.
- Harvest appears next to a debris field when you have a recycler and a free fleet slot.
- Message and Add Buddy are the social ones.
- Warp shows up between two of your own moons that both have a Warp Gate.
- Hephaestus owners also get deploy, move and dock icons for the platform.
Recyclers are slow. If you are about to hit a planet with ships in orbit, send the recyclers out early so they arrive just after the battle instead of an hour later, when somebody else may have taken the debris.
Legend
The Legend button at the bottom right of the table opens the full key.
Travelling
Ships are the only way to move between planets. How long a trip takes comes down to two things: how far it is, and how fast the slowest ship in the fleet can go.
Distance
Distance is a flat number worked out from the coordinates. There are four cases:
- Same slot, for example a planet to its own moon: 5.
- Same solar system: 1,000 plus 5 for every slot in between. Slot 1 to slot 10 is 1,000 + 45 = 1,045.
- Same galaxy, different system: 2,700 plus 95 for every system in between. System 1 to system 10 is 2,700 + 855 = 3,555.
- Different galaxy: 20,000 for every galaxy in between. Galaxy 1 to galaxy 3 is 40,000.
Look at the jumps. Hopping one system across costs nearly as much as hopping ten, and crossing into the next galaxy costs more than crossing a whole galaxy's worth of systems. That is what gives your part of space a soft edge. Past a certain point a trip just takes too long to be worth making.
Speed
Every ship has a base speed and runs on one of three drives. Researching that drive makes the ship faster:
- Jet Drive, 10% per level
- Pulse Drive, 20% per level
- Warp Drive, 30% per level
The result is the ship's effective speed:
effective speed = base speed × (1 + level × bonus)
A Poseidon Class Cruiser has a base speed of 15,000 and runs on Pulse Drive. At Pulse Drive 4 that is 15,000 × (1 + 4 × 0.20) = 27,000.
Two ships swap to a better drive once you have researched far enough. The Atlas Class Cargo moves from Jet to Pulse at Pulse Drive 5, which doubles its speed but also doubles its fuel use. The Ares Class Bomber moves from Pulse to Warp at Warp Drive 8, which adds a quarter to its speed.
A fleet only travels as fast as its slowest ship. Put one Hercules Class Cargo in with a stack of Poseidons and the whole fleet moves at Hercules pace.
Travel time
The dispatch screen works the time out for you, but the formula behind it is:
seconds = (350,000 ÷ speed% × √(distance × 10 ÷ fleet speed) + 10) ÷ 2
speed% is the percentage you pick in the dropdown, anywhere from 5 to 100. Fleet speed is the effective speed of the slowest ship you are sending. The divide by two at the end is the universe speed setting: SFC2 runs at double speed, so every trip takes half as long as the raw number.
Here are some times at full speed with no drive research at all, to give you a feel for the scale:
| Ship | Base speed | Next slot (1,005) | 10 systems away (3,650) | Next galaxy (20,000) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dionysus Class Recycler | 2,000 | 1:05 | 2:04 | 4:51 |
| Gaia Class Colony Ship | 2,500 | 0:58 | 1:51 | 4:20 |
| Hercules Class Cargo | 7,500 | 0:33 | 1:04 | 2:30 |
| Poseidon Class Cruiser | 15,000 | 0:23 | 0:45 | 1:46 |
Two things to remember. The time shown is one way. And the time is locked in the moment the fleet launches, so finishing a drive research while ships are in the air does not make them arrive any sooner.
Fuel
Hydrogen is the fuel. Every ship has a consumption rating, and the fuel for the trip has to be sitting on the planet the fleet leaves from. It is worked out for each type of ship in the fleet separately:
fuel = consumption × count × (distance ÷ 35,000) × (speed% ÷ 100 × √(fleet speed ÷ ship speed) + 1)2
The fuel is taken when the fleet launches and nothing more is charged when it comes home. It does not ride in the cargo hold either, so it never eats into what you can carry. If you want to send hydrogen as cargo on top of the fuel, the planet has to have enough for both.
The part worth learning is the speed term. Sending a fleet slower costs a lot less hydrogen. That is why long raids and long transports usually go out at less than full speed, and why the speed dropdown is worth a look every time you dispatch.
Warp Gates
There is one way round all of this. If two of your own moons both have a Warp Gate, you can jump ships between them in five seconds no matter how far apart they are, and it costs no hydrogen. Both gates go on cooldown afterwards. The cooldown is an hour at gate level 1 and drops by 15% per level after that, so a high level gate can fire every fifteen minutes or so.
The shape of the universe
Because distance comes straight out of the coordinate numbers, the map behaves like a line. Galaxy 3 is twice as far from galaxy 1 as galaxy 2 is, and system 200 is a very long way from system 1 in the same galaxy. Two practical results:
- Try not to settle at the very start or the very end of a galaxy. A colony in the middle can reach systems in both directions. A colony at the edge only reaches one way and has half the neighbours.
- Spreading colonies across galaxies buys you reach, but you cannot reinforce them quickly. Anything you put out on its own has to be able to look after itself. See Fleet Saving for how to keep it alive when you are not around.
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