Terminology

This page collects the slang players use in the forum, in alliance chat and in messages to each other. Almost none of it is official game wording, so you will not find these words anywhere in the interface.

Some of the shorthand does come straight from the game. The letters next to a player's name in the Galaxy list are real, and the Legend button under the slot list spells every one of them out.

The list

• Bashing - Hitting the same target over and over. SFC2 allows six attacks per target per 24 hours and refuses the seventh. Every planet and every moon counts as its own target. See Bashing.
• Boomerang (fleetlock) - Working out when someone's fleet is due home and timing an attack to land on top of it. SFC2 never shows you another player's fleets while they are in the air, and the Oracle is a target finder rather than a fleet scanner, so this is guesswork built on spy reports and patience.
• DF - Debris field. The wreck pile left over a slot after a battle, worth 30% of the ore and crystal that the destroyed ships cost to build. Destroyed defenses leave nothing. See Debris.
• Drop colony - A colony planted next to somebody you want to hit, so the flight is minutes instead of hours. The slot next door is ideal, but anywhere in the same system already cuts the trip down enormously compared to coming from the next system over. You are capped at 10 planets, so a drop colony costs you one of them. Moons do not count against the cap.
• DSP - Destroyed Ships Points. You earn the build cost of every ship you blow up, divided by 1,000, and only half rate against an NPC. Destroyed defenses are worth nothing. DSP is a leader board of its own and it only ever goes up. See Leaders.
• Farmer - A player who puts most of their resources into mines. Rich, and usually soft.
• Fodder - Cheap hulls you bring so the enemy wastes shots on them. Nothing in an SFC2 battle picks its target, so every extra ship on the field is one more wrong thing to shoot at. See Fodder.
• FRS - Fleet and resource saving. Sending your ships and your resources away on a mission so there is nothing on the planet when an attack lands. See the section below and Fleet / Resource Saving.
• i and I - The inactive markers beside a name in the Galaxy list. Lowercase i is seven days without a login, uppercase I is twenty one days. Inactive players lose newbie protection and the rank gap rule, so anyone can hit them. See Inactive players.
• MAC - Mobile Assault Colony. A colony you keep in or beside a target system and launch from, instead of flying across galaxies every time. The permanent version of a drop colony. See Mobile Assault Colony.
• Moonshot - An attack sent to make a moon rather than to take resources. The chance is that battle's debris divided by 15,000,000, capped at 20%, so all that matters is how much cheap metal dies over the slot. Alliance mates often trade moonshots, hitting each other with matched fleets so both sides get a roll. The moon always goes to the defender. See Moon.
• n and N - Galaxy markers that mean you cannot attack. Lowercase n is a player in newbie protection or too weak for you to hit. Uppercase N is a player too strong for you to hit. See Newbie Protection.
• Ninja (ninja defend) - Landing a defending fleet on a planet just before somebody else's attack arrives, so the attacker walks into a wall that was not there when they launched. Timing is everything. A defender who lands one second late does nothing at all. In SFC2 this is the Group Defend mission, and a planet can hold six defending fleets. See Group Defend.
• Ninja FRS - Emptying a planet in the last minutes before an attack lands, so the attacker arrives to nothing and gets no glory out of it either.
• NPC - Non-player character. The Krug, Urcath, Seekers and other outposts sitting in solar systems. They fight back, they can be farmed, and none of the protection rules apply to them. See Non-player character.
• Probe - A Hermes Class Probe, the ship espionage runs on. "Send a probe" means spy. The eye icon in the Galaxy Actions column launches however many probes you set under Settings, with no form to fill in.
• Pushing - Feeding resources or free kills to a higher ranked player. It is against the Rules and it gets accounts banned.
• RSP - Resources Spent Points. Despite the name it is not a running total of what you have spent. It is the build cost of everything you own right now, buildings, mines, power plants, research, ships and defenses, divided by 1,000. Tear a building down or lose a fleet and your RSP drops with it. Most of the protection rules are measured against this number, and your Overall rank is RSP plus DSP.
• Shark - A player who buys attack ships and almost no defenses, and keeps the fleet alive with FRS.
• Sim - Running a fight through the Calculator page before you send it. The Calculator plays the battle three times and shows you the worst of the three for the attacker, so a real attack usually goes a little better than the sim said it would.
• Slow join (slow probing) - Joining an attack formation with a fleet that cannot get there on time, which drags the whole group's landing back. SFC2 allows up to 30% of the original flight time in extra wait and refuses any fleet slower than that. The extra minutes are the point: they buy one more look at the target before the attack lands. See Group Attack.
• Turtle - A player who puts most of their resources into defenses.
• Wall - Somebody's defenses. Clearing one rarely pays for itself. Defenses leave no debris and 70% of what you destroy is rebuilt for free straight after the battle, so the only thing worth having is the plunder sitting behind the wall.
• Zerglings - A swarm of the cheapest fighter in the game in place of a handful of expensive ones. See Artemis Zerglings.

Fleet saving

FRS is the one bit of jargon that is also a button. Fleet Save sits in the mission row on the Fleets page, next to Harvest and Group Defend, and unlike the other missions it shows you every ship you own instead of just the ones that mission needs.

One catch that surprises people: Fleet Save runs on the harvest mission underneath, so the game will not launch it unless there is at least one recycler in the fleet. Try it without a Dionysus or a Zagreus and you get "A Recycler Ship is required for harvest". That is the main reason to own a recycler even if you never harvest anything.

Cargo goes with the fleet, so a proper save takes the resources too. See Fleet / Resource Saving for how to pick the flight time.