the engine is built on a very shoddy base that creates, populates, saves and destroys and restarts the whole level every frame when in edit mode

That right there...
wow...
You sir, have found one of the most complicated ways, I can imagine to do this...

It'd be great to see the project!

What version of love is it all in?
I also love (haha, accidental pun) what you've posted so far,
please, please, please finish it

It's really cool, the update is nice though.

Are you supposed to be able to reassign planets, and an AI would be nice.
(I'm also not sure what the bottom buttons actually do, or what they cost)

Wait, what is this cult/secret society reference?

So... why the minecraft background?

Do you have any photos or code that you can show, or is it mostly an idea now?

oooh!
You could fix the starting countdown text blurriness by making a larger font.

From graphics.newFont on the wiki:
font = love.graphics.newFont( filename, size )

This is very cool, well done.
It would be nice however to be able to click to add the walls and water.