That's one way to look at it I guess... another would be, make sure you don't ignore mining altogether, as credits and Exotic matter are very important as you get higher.
391 planets at the moment for me and I honestly don't even look at invasion costs. Ya gotta pay the bills

I just used the calculator now, and with 10 planets to hit my max, I could do that 7 times with the current number of cr I have.

Course, I realize that my colonize and invasion costs are MUCH lower than most of you cause I only have 230 planets...soooo. Yeah.

Probably a self solving issue. Higher you get and further along, the less crap you want to colonize anyways. Plus by the time you could have 500 planets even, youd be what most people would consider pretty seasoned in the game. At any rate, what diego said. Em and invasion costs help provide a little more balance. But only in so much as people want a high planet count. I'm sure some people have only a 100 and if those are all 15x, well they are probably doing pretty well.

You can always sell planets, artis, etc to pay the bills..or just have rich benefactors in legion who send you credits. Where there's a will there's a way. Haven't seen too many nice planets NOT get invaded due to lack of $.

Eh, i earn enough credits, that even with a cost of 217Bil to colonize, i could do that every day for a few weeks, maybe a month.

Only question really, would be whether i wait for more vl 1x(or better) to colonize or just go for them moniez, and make a bunch more toxics.