Colony changes hands

There is a pirate shipyard in the area of the planet you settled.  One of the ships attacked and conquered your colony.  A pirate ship also destroyed the ship you sent to investigate.  You didn't see them because they have more sensor range and more moves than your ships do.  They alpha currently doesn't do a good job of showing when and where things like that happen.

Your starting survey ship can handle the pirate ships.  There are three of them at each shipyard.  Once they are gone, the shipyard doesn't make more.  You can then attack and conquer the planet they took from you.  Another way it to use your survey ship to attack and conquer the planet first.  They will try to take it back, but you can use your survey ship to destroy them.  You can also send a fleet of ships to do the same thing, if you have the tech to make armed ships.

There are also Space Monsters and Precursors in the galaxy that can conquer your colonies.  They are more powerful than your starting survey ship and are also more powerful than any ship you can build early in the game.  You will eventually be able to build fleets that can win, but at great losses to your fleet.  It will take a while to get rid of them.

Pirates destroy colony ships.  Space Monsters and Precursors can capture them and use them to settle their own colonies.  You can also capture the colony ships they acquired by capturing your colony ships or the colony ships of the other races.

If you settle a colony and turn it into a core world, none of them can build transports to take it from you.

Old-Spider is correct. But in the next update the pirates will start building more ships from their shipyards.

I also need to check and make sure that when your colony is taken there is a notification for it. I hope that there was and you just missed it, but I'm not sure. If it's missing I'll make sure we add it.

TY for the information. 

I can confirm that there is no on screen popup saying you have been attacked, those silly icons on the left side of the screen might say something but.

I would not know as they are just more Micro-Management as they are just another thing I tend to ignore.

I would most assuredly prefer a popup like the anomaly notifications or the are you sure you want to do this popups.

Yeah. We reduced them to just icons right before EA. They used to be icons with the text beside them. We are trying not to clutter up the screen but I know that it causes many players to ignore them since you dont want to mouse over each one to see what it is.

We will have to think about it.

Would most assuredly be appreciated on my part, especially considering you and I disagreeing about how to play the game when it comes to size of your empire  .

If you could set a filter for them (in the game settings perhaps) so that we could filter the buildings/ships completed notifications, the battle outcome notifications (assuming we'll be able to see the battles), the diplomatic notifications, etc, we would not ignore them so much.