some combat questions:

[Corinthian]

Yeah, I need all these questions answered as well! I woke up this morning to find one of my outposts gone. There was no mail or notice generated to tell me what happened or who did it. One player in the list is now set to embargo, so is that who hit me?? Why wouldn't it be set to war if that was the case.
Is me not getting notification of the attack a bug or is that the norm...
Damn... So confused...

[SixDaysShort]

outposts have no natural defense, i don't think. so, i THINK they need to be supported by leaving ships in their orbit to defend against someone taking it. Colonies will have an inherent defense based on population. But, i think they should be defended as well. To partially answer SG7's question -- in the "how combat works" tutorial, I remember seeing some values. an 850mu planet had like 6000 atk and 12000 def. And a 1mu planet had stuff in the teens. So, you know...somewhere between that for our starting planets? lol.

chickenhawk -- i waited to colonize until i could build destroyers (so that i could transport and defend the colony). If you don't want to wait for destroyers, one possibility is to use outpost ships. They're super expensive. But, they have an atk/def of something like 9/7...which is better than any 1 destoyer (maybe more, i still don't know how combat works, exactly). If it survives long enough for your colony to start building its own ships/shipyard, you can deploy it to a planet while you build some fighters (be careful, though. I lost something like 8 fighters to 1 destroyer.

If there's one bit of advice i could give you at this point (i'm not sure if it's a bug or not), but defend the shit out of your shipyards. fighters can't do a thing to defend against destroyers. And, if destoyers take out your shipyard, not only do you have to rebuild it to increase your limit. But, you're no longer able to build destroyers -- while your opponent can very easily keep doing so. You're at an insurmountable disadvantage assuming he wants to finish you.

[SG7]

I have seen those values but something is broken. For testing purposes I have attacked a 400Mu planet with destroyers. Besides fireworks nothing happened to the planed or to the destroyers. I waited 20 minutes and went away.

[ChickenHawk07]

Interesting...