I've kept on playing Next Colony, though sometimes I question if it's worth the time I put in. I'm definitely not as devoted as some, but it's some time. I have absolutely no interest in battling, but I've found that I have had to build some offensive ships out of necessity.
When I just had explorers and transporters I was getting knocked around a fair bit. So I built some Corvettes and Destroyers. And that seemed to dissaude attackers for a time. But lately I've been getting seiged and attacked by huge numbers of ships. And they're all timed such that I can't do anything to defend against it, because when my fleet returns my planet is under seige, and then the attack comes.
So I build up my fleet for a while, do some exploring, and then get my fleet wiped out and basically have to start over. Here are some of my most recent defeats.
This one wasn't too bad, but it was timed such that it happened overnight while I slept. By the time I knew it was happening, my fleet was gone and my planet was under seige. The 2nd attack was to destroy all my ships that came back from exploring after the first attack happened.
This was a similar situation, but with the numbers amped way up. Unnecessarily so I would add. All I had on the planet at this time was explorers.
This next was the one that seemed like the cheapest shot. It happened just after the recent Steem block chain outage. So Steem was down for days, and once the chain was back, it took a while for auxiliary services like steemconnect and the next colony gui client to come back. Which meant I couldn't get in through the normal channels, so I just didn't worry about it too much. When I got back on, I was greeted by this:
It was over before I could get logged in. Even if I had been able to see it coming, there's nothing I could do against those numbers. Here's what I lost. The attacker lost 7 ships. 7.
Seven.