Could not reclaim defensive stronghold

I had purchased a few defensive strongholds from the Merchant to place on my conquered expedition colony. Once I placed them, I changed my mind and tried to use the "blow up the building" mechanic to remove them from the map back to my star menu. After the explosion sound, the buildings never went through the "tearing down" animation, and never returned to my star menu. I tried all the usual fixes --> refreshing game, deleting cache, etc.

The only thing I could think of that was different than normal was that there were several hours between my conquering the colony and my building of defenses, but I was under the impression that you could delay the building of defenses and the claiming of the colony for as long as you want, just as long as you had conquered the colony within the allotted time. Is this not so, and if not, how do you know how much time you have left before you must finalize the building of defenses and claiming of the expedition island.

But the good news is that someone will have an easier time of conquering this expedition island from me because I have two defensive strongholds that are completely empty. Good news for them, but not for me. Also, I'm out 400 valor points.

You are the first person that I hear about having even used those strongholds from the merchant, so I can't say if tearing it down and then being gone is working as intended or not, but BB probably doesn't know either so it's working as intended by default.

With that said, iirc many don't even bother with setting up defenses anymore/build them into the remote sectors for others to XP farm more easily. Most of us would probably perfectly ignore it, but you may want to send a bug report (well, posting here works I guess, some BB ought to pick it up eventually to forward), just don't expect anything to happen about it anytime soon hehe

Thanks for the comment! I will start making my colonies easy to farm once I earn the Colony Defense achievements. (At the rate I'm going with successful defense of colonies, I will probably have leveled my island before then.)