Can a good planet held by someone under lvl 20 that quit the game ever be invaded?

I stupidly wasted a bunch of energy knocking the pop down of one I've had in my waitlist for a while to be invaded only to notice it's held by a lvl 8 and that must be why it won't let me invade. Initially I thought the energy cost was just much higher than I anticipated (thought I think it would have told me so).

Are these planets simply lost from the pool? Already so much of the galaxy we don't ever scan, but finding enemy owned planets that can't even be invaded seems like a real kick in the teeth.

no if a person stop playing their account will be deleted and the planet will no longer be theirs.

That obviously takes a good amt of time to happen since I have 2 legion members that have been disabled lvl 4 and 6's for over a month. =P

Either way was I correct in assuming my inability to invade is due to his rank? I can't imagine the energy cost to invade is over 20 if it's 10 to colonize.

energy cost is the same, newbie protection is lost after 2 weeks of gameplay so if hes held it for lonegr then 2 weeks its your for the taking.

Hmm that could be it then. I may have scanned it within the past 2 weeks with my last blitz and he's not out of protection - I'd forgotten about the time addition to rank 20 which was a brilliant idea to solve inactive players (even before deletion).

The only unfortunate part is there is no way to know when such players are out of protection without spending the energy to take off the population first since you can't actually target the player, just the planet, heh. With minimal atk/def on it though, that's not the worst thing in the world.

Such a shame to see a decent oceanic with extremely rich research (very sparse mining/abundant artifact) have 3 mining/7.5 artifact/0 research production /hr. Real damn shame, haha. Especially when I've found 120 planets and almost none with reasonable research to date.

Thanks for the response Coth.

Np, gotta do something at 4AM