So, I'm currently at year 2037. I thought I had been doing pretty well with about 380,000 tons of dedicated combat ships as my main offensive fleet. I just sent a probe into a system where a survey ship got destroyed, and found 524,000 tons worth of enemy ships (and 6 defensive stations) above a planet. I'm not sure if I'm unlucky or if I should have had a bigger fleet by now
Are you only counting ships with military engines there? Because obviously it doesn't take that big a stack of commercial ships to fill out a tonnage like that. Even less so for a stack of space stations!
(Also it might not be a normal NPR.)
I know its the defensive spoiler, just trying to minimize spoilers for new players.
Anyway, instead of attacking that system, I decided to attack a different system that had the same spoiler race, just less of them. It ended up being a draw, because I spread my fire too much and the first two waves didn't penetrate the enemy shields, so I ran out of ammo before killing anything (I could have kept firing, but after 4 salvos 1/3 of my ships were down to older missiles, and the older missiles were slower). The next two salvos after that did get through shields, but the defensive bases deployed decoys that seduced half of my missiles from each salvo that got through, which meant the bases only took 4 penetrating hits each. Time to spend about 3 years replacing the missiles I expended, I guess.
On the bright side, the missile combat was way less "all or nothing" than it used to be. Retargeting AMMs and gauss turrets handled most of the incoming missiles, but there were still leakers. One of my cruisers took 22% armor damage, plus a few hits on a couple other ones. The next version of my cruisers will probably trade armor to mount a shield generator, as that way leaks get regenerated