(Build) How to defend your CHG settlement in a lot of difficult and expensive steps

1. If it's pirates, bribe them into leaving you alone. Seriously it's cheaper than maintaining the defenses to keep them at bay just suck in your pride and do it or they will come down, strip your settlement of everything of worth, kidnap everyone and use them add to the black markets for both organs and slaves. If you're being targeted by pirates that already means there's little hope of getting any help in time... they don't just attack anyone.

2. Okay, it's aliens and terrorists. Surrender immediately at the same time as sending out a distress beacon for help. There's no way you can take that on alone. If they're not fans of accepting surrenders, it's evacuation time.

3. Wow, you're still here. Okay, let's say money and resources are no objects and you HAVE to withstand whatever it is rather than running away or surrendering. And help isn't coming for a while.

4. Be in possession of an Orbital Defense Station. The majority of planets have at least one, doubling as a space port, that can be moved to any side of the planet that's under attack. These have turrets, ports for warships (*coughs* mostly used by trading vessels *cough*) and, if you're very lucky, a large portal so that you can get yourself a stream of ships coming in to defend you... assuming you have friends on other planets who possess warships.

5. If they've taken out the Orbital Defense Station, then you should've already used the fact that it at least slowed them down to evacuate your settlment.

6. If the Orbital Defense Station has fallen faster than you could evacuate, here's where red herrings come in. You see, a lot of planets deliberately build tonnes of settlements in all sorts of locations that don't actually have any individuals in them. Assuming your settlement isn't a major one that the invaders will be able to pick out, these should help provide red herrings to add to the time you've got to run away or, if the enemy splits its forces, decrease the amount sent your way.

7. None of that worked? Surrender still not an option? Well, if they're going down a genocide route then you're dead already as they've just dropped a nuclear bomb on your 20 house village.

8. If they're going for conquest, then you stand a chance as it's at this point where they'll deploy ground or air forces (which don't have planet-destroying lasers) which you can reply to with your own. If you're lacking, send all of your cleaning bots and undesirables at them to slow them down while everyone runs away. If that won't work and everyone must fight, hope that you've got plenty of Air Grenades because those are the standard defensive weapon for crappy settlements... like your settlement. It's automatically crappy because you're in it. You stupid donkey.

9. If all of that doesn't work and the military hasn't arrived to help you then I don't know what to say I'm talking to a charred skeleton.