I just lost my first real battle. I'd fought small skirmishes against precursors and the swarm, and usually won easily. Well I finally fought a real NPR, and got my ass kicked.
I found an NPR 3 jumps away from Sol, and 1 jump away from my jump gate network. Set up thermal sensor buoys on my side of their jump point and started communications. 2 years later, my thermal sensor buoy picks up a strong contact, sitting stationary on my side of the JP. I send out my fleet to get a scan of the ship. The active sensors measure their tonnage to be 77000 tons; obviously a gate construction ship. Seeing that the ship is harmless, I turn off my actives so as to not hurt my diplomatic relationship with them. I don't move away though, as I want to stay within gun range of the JP, in case anything nasty comes through. A few weeks later, a massive fleet jumps through the JP, and I know its about to get real.
Individually my ships were far superior to theirs, but they just had so many more than me. I had seven 7000 ton beam-armed destroyers, 3 armed with 15cm railguns and a twin Gauss turret, 2 with multiple 15cm lasers and a single spinal-mounted 19cm laser, and 2 with my sensors and triple Gauss turrets. They had easily twenty ~9000 ton ships, and around ten 13000 ton ships. Many, many different classes.
Approximately half the fleet appeared right on the gate, the other half appeared some distance away. I open fire. First volley destroys the gate constructor, and the near half begins to flee. The far half splits into two groups, half coming towards me (obviously beam combatants) half away. I am significantly faster than all of them, ~5400kms compared to ~2500kms. 10 seconds later my second volley destroys a 9,000 ton ship. 10 more seconds and another 9000 ton ship goes down. 4th volley fired after 10 more seconds, and a 3rd 9000 ton ship goes down. Suddenly, missiles are detected, TONS of them coming from the distant group. Thankfully they're all really slow; only ~10,000kms. Two kinds, mostly size 3, a few size 5's. I set course directly away from the missiles at full speed, so as to get as much firing time as possible on them with my PD. I shoot down easily 50 of them, maybe more. But there's still dozens more salvos coming. Thankfully they were not aiming at my ships
They were targeting my sensor buoy! So once one hits it, all the rest of those missiles disappear!
I return to chasing down the nearby fleet, and kill 2 more 9000 ton ships. As I'm chasing them, I detect more missiles. WAY more than last time, and worse yet, some of them are fast; 21000kms. Even worse, I'm having trouble getting area defense PD to work. It worked fine on the first big group, the one that had targeted the sensor buoy, but now I can't get them to automatically target the missiles. I shoot down over a hundred, but I start taking hits. And the hits add up, and slowly I lose all my ships. This is pretty much the end of my game, as I don't really have any more ships. All I've got left is ten 1000-ton laser FAC's in Sol that I built to keep the peace while my destroyers were away.