Newbie Protection

Newbie protection keeps new players and much larger players from fighting each other. While it applies, the bigger player cannot attack, spy on or missile the smaller one, and the smaller one cannot do any of that back. It is on automatically from the moment you start and it comes off on its own once you have built enough.

Everything is measured in Resources Spent Points (RSP), the score on the Resources Spent leaderboard. It counts what you have built: buildings, mines, ships, defenses and techs. Resources sitting in your warehouses do not count.

The rules

There are three bands.

Under 750 RSP. You cannot attack another player and no other player can attack you. This is full protection.
750 to 25,000 RSP. You can only fight players whose RSP is between one fifth and five times yours. If either side falls outside that window, the attack is blocked.
25,000 RSP and up. Once both players are at 25,000 or more, the ratio stops mattering and either one can hit the other, however far apart they are. If the smaller player is still under 25,000, the one fifth to five times rule still applies.

The check is symmetric. If you cannot attack someone, they cannot attack you either.

Examples:

You have 4,000 RSP. Only players between 800 and 20,000 RSP can attack you, and those are the only ones you can attack.
You have 30,000 RSP and you find a 3,000 RSP player. Blocked. They are under 25,000, so the ratio applies, and 3,000 is below 30,000 divided by 5.
You have 30,000 RSP and someone has 5,000,000. That one is allowed both ways, because you are both over 25,000.

What it blocks

Newbie protection is checked on every hostile action:

Attack, including joining a group attack. Every attacker in a group is checked against the target on their own.
Espionage probes, including the one click spy button on the Galaxy row.
Interplanetary Ballistic Missiles.

It does not touch anything else. Group Defend is not restricted by RSP at all, so a huge alliance mate or buddy can still send ships to sit on a small player's planet. Harvesting a debris field, colonising, transporting and deploying are all unaffected.

When a dispatch is blocked you get a message on the fleet screen instead of a launch.

The three you will see are "This player is under newbie protection", "You are under newbie protection and cannot attack other players" and "Ranks are too far apart to attack this player".

Two exceptions

NPCs are always fair game. Protection never applies to them in either direction, so farming NPC encounters is the normal way to build RSP while you are protected.
Inactive players lose it. Anyone who has not logged in for 7 days can be attacked by anybody, whatever the RSP gap, and an inactive player's own protection does not save them.

Reading the Galaxy view

The Status column on the Galaxy screen tells you who you can and cannot touch before you waste a flight.

Hover the letter for the reason:

n with "Newbie Protection" means that player is under 750 RSP.
n with "You are under Newbie Protection" means you are the one under 750.
n with "Too weak to attack" means they are more than five times smaller than you.
N with "Too strong to attack" means they are more than five times bigger than you.

The rank number next to the name is colour coded too. It goes grey when protection applies, blue when the player is weaker than you, and red when they are stronger. Grey means do not bother.

The other letters in that column are separate systems: d is diplomacy mode, P is PVE mode, v is vacation mode and i or I is an inactive player.

Checking your own RSP

Your planet panel on the Overview page shows whether protection is on.

For the number itself, go to Leaders and pick Resources Spent under All-Time. Your own rank is called out at the top right and your row is highlighted in the list. The board is rebuilt once an hour, so a big build finishing does not move your RSP straight away.

Protected players are tagged (n) on that list. That tag is cleared when the player next logs in and clicks through the box below, so it can lag a little for someone who has not played in a while. The Galaxy view is always current.

When protection ends

The moment you pass 750 RSP and load a page, the game stops you with this:

You have to acknowledge it before you can carry on playing. There is also a one time offer here to drop straight into diplomacy mode without the usual 24 hour wait. Diplomacy stops attacks but cuts your resource production, and it does not protect you if you go 7 days without logging in.

Once protection is off, you are in the open. Before that happens you want to know how to fleet save, and you want some defenses on the ground so a raider does not walk off with everything you own. Read Plunder for what an attacker can actually take.

Two other things it changes

You cannot start a new topic on the public forum until at least one of your players is past newbie protection. Replying to existing topics is fine.
NPC encounters are not seeded around your planets while you are protected. They start turning up nearby once protection ends. You can still fly out and hit any encounter you can reach in the meantime.