I also tried next colony

I’m still going just a very long game. I broke out the excel sheet just to knew when I’d get a explore ship. It’s going be a while! For now I just log in once or twice a day click a skill and that’s it.

alarm clocks

I use to do that so much in Eve Online for skills! Thankfully they came to their senses after a while and allowed you to have skills running for at least 24 hours.

irregular sleep

This is true! I got one guy who checks my planets at least 20 times a day now. Has yet to attack just keeps ending waves of them to probe. Tempting before I stop to just put all my resource into ships and say hello to his main planet.