Colony or Outpost?

[Supamand]

That's another good point. The way the game is designed now, if you show up in orbit of an enemy colony with anything less than 20 dreadnoughts, you lose your entire fleet and inflict no lasting damage.

I'm trying to understand how this system seems fun or sensical.

Well think about it. If the planets were weaker, than a noob would be able to kill your home world and take all your outpost wile you are sleeping!
And it could of been done on like a
Second day after a server launch.
I think the system is pretty well balanced, we just need to understand it better

But Jet, if you are looking to destroy planets, you should consider Bering a warlord. They get really strong ships. You'd probably only need 2 or 3 to wipe out a colony in 1 shot.
Not to mansion the planet killer ship that can kill a planet in 1 shot from across the sector!!!

[JetJaguar2000]

Sure, I get that, but there is a big difference between not being able to gank planets on day 2, and needing 20 dreadnoughts to take an undefended one.

A better system in my mind is one where planets have depletable defenses, rather than the "all or nothing" system in place now. Planets could start with some decent defenses to prevent early game rushes, but if someone chooses to suicide a ton of smaller ships against my planet over the course of a couple of days and whittle down its defenses, they deserve to have it. Of course, I could opt to use resources to improve my defenses.

We'll have to wait and see if the stuff I experienced today is a bug or not, but the fact that destroyers and cruisers seem utterly worthless feels problematic to me. At best a bunch of them could take an undefended outpost, but no chance whatsoever against a colony. The fact that it takes new colonies all of 4 hours to become effectively invincible is lame.

Also, for what it's worth, I don't want to attack planets just for fun. What I want to see is more player interaction -- more battling over resources, etc. The way it stands now it's almost the opposite of the scenario you describe: you can secure your planets to the point of never needing to worry about losing them in a matter of hours. On the time scale of a 2 month game, this seems like a shame.