Defense is useless....

25k Cloak otherwise you will lose your planet

Do you seriously believe a lousy +9999 def will stop a rank 1k +????, fact is big guns who put alot more into the game then rest of us have every right to take any good planets low rankers have. Also like Kochan said defence is useless, until a new way more op shield gets added to research only way to hold a planet is spam cloack and regularly check up that noone has it scanned

The and is super important. Many do the cloak, but then leave it on someoenes scan to be taken.

Archilles, how did you get both of those colossal planets that were stolen?

You need at least 100K+ to protect it against the highest ranks
That's why you have planetary protection for a week or till rank 20 to research the best you can to protect those decent planets

You need at least 200k+ to protect it from the highest ranks, and even then odds are one of us will get it at 10% chance.

When both The Sun Tzu and KoChan are telling you defense is not enough to protect your best planets, then it is wise to listen.

By all means, research obviation barriers and defend yourself against less capable threats, but ultimately, if the big fish can see your planet, then they can take your planet.

Your main priority for planets you really want to keep should always be cloaking it as much as you can, but until you can hit 20k cloak or so (preferably 26.5k cloak) then add as many obviation barriers, domain walkers, barrier nexus, galactic concord stations and other assorted % defense buffs as you can.

Regularly flux probe your planets, set traps and hope no one stumbles upon your little gem
Might also be a good idea to flux probe your planets twice a day on Wednesdays and Saturdays when the Universal Terminal scan buffs are available to the higher ranks.

The fact that cloaking is really the only way to protect a planet only adds weight to the suggestion made in the OP. To have anywhere near even 20k cloak at those low ranks they would need to pay a higher ranked player to do it for them. There is just no way for them to get access to all the artis needed to cloak planets like that. I've always thought there should be much greater protection provided to low rank players (under 100 especially, but even ships below rank 300 have no means of realistically protecting their planets), as it would encourage these newer players to the game to build decent planets even if it costs a bit of gp to make them and stick with the game.

That's true not4use, but I don't really think the game is geared towards Rank 17 players having 2 good colossal planets to steal in the first place.

To be honest, for me at least, allowing resets and canny purchasers extra protection for their prime planets would probably not be helpful to retaining new players either... a "protected" 22x MC arti in the hands of an experienced reset SSB wouldn't be fun for people starting to play at that time from scratch.

As far as GP options go for low rankers, they seem quite plentiful to me with the exotic and dyson, if not the rifts.

I myself lost some good planets along the way, but really, that's just the nature of the game.
I don't really see how losing a 17x Gaia at Rank 700 to someone who is Rank 1200 is any different from losing a Colossal whatever at Rank 17 to a Rank 500... there's just always going to be bigger fish looking to take your stuff if they can find it

More and more, I'm not even defending my planets except for a few thousand to keep the lowbies away. I don't bother with cloak except for on my 15X+ planets; I just count on losing x number of planets per month and count that as the cost of doing business. The last 15X arti I lost was a VM Aphotic, had about 60K attack and 30K cloak - didn't help obviously.