• Your experience seems to follow the normal rules.
• I can't load your game because I don't have the Vaulters.
• I can make some good guesses about what happened.
• You can load a game and play as another player or an AI. To do so you'll need to edit your saved game using any program that can open bzip2 files (I used 7zip). Do a search for (Some Numbers) . Delete it. Save it. Load the game as the AI and see what they were doing.
• Your understanding of the combat mechanics is incorrect. Please consult the Endless Space Disharmony Wiki for much more information.
• http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Combat_(Disharmony)
• With nosebreaker, you shot the first ship on the enemy's list, that means you were shooting at the 719 defense Dreadnaught.
• Defense Modules have (at least) two effects, a special defense effect and the normal defense effect.
• For T3 Deflectors the special is that the first 25 shots that would hit are blocked. This you have more or less correct.
• The second is that each type of damage is reduced by the appropriate defense type. Math follows later.
• With 719 defense you are not facing 17 T3 Deflectors. It is some number less than that, however the AI will have a ton of bonuses on that, so 17 T3 is as good as estimate as any for explaining what happened.
• With that many shots, EvasionDisorientation approximately makes your accuracy ~88% in the Long Range Phase, and 85% in the Medium and Short Phase.
• The accuracy loss due to racial ability is unimportant in this situation.
• ~450 shots are blocked due to T3 deflectors.
• Damage = damage * HullWeakness/(TotalDefense + HullWeakness)
• 17 T3 Deflectors at 420 defense per deflector = 7140 Total Kinetic Defense
• = damage * 100/(7140+100)
• = 1.38% damage is dealt
• This assumes that our defense calculation of 7140 is accurate. It is probably higher than this.
• For my ease of math, let's just assume that you had a full fleet of your RK-KD destroyers (22 ships) with 11 T3 modules each.
• That's 242 modules shooting, 215.7 (on average) hit. Each shoots 125 shots, so around 4 are blocked by the Deflectors. This leaves ~211 hits.
• 211 * 125*3 = 79125 potential damage.
• Reduced to 1.38% * 79125 = 1091 actual damage per round (Kinetics shoot 4 times per range phase) in the long range.
• This is reduced by 50% in the medium and short ranges, so 545 in each of those.
• This will also drop as you lose ships.
• Your +80% damage and critical hits will increase this, but since our estimates for defense are complete guesses, it doesn't matter for this explanation.
• With 7 Ships, the enemy could kill your entire fleet in the long range phase.
• Total damage is estimated to be ~2000 barring any healing, if our estimates are close.
• BattleCards would make a difference, if the AI had a working defense card, you might end up doing less than 1k damage total.
• If the AI played healing cards, their ships may come out of the combat with more health than they started with.
  
  

• Now you ask, what are you supposed to do about this?
• You have the right idea, just swap kinetics for Missiles.
• I like to have a mix of kinetics, missiles, lasers, and bombers in my glass cannon designs.
• This keeps the enemy honest in his defense distribution. So he might trash your kinetic fleet (per your experience), but then has to suffer 459,000 damage worth of missiles.
• To counter your ship mix, he has to use omnidefense (defenses of all three types), which makes him equally vulnerable to all weapons and reduces the amount of weapons his own ships carry.
  
  

I can't load your game because I don't have the Vaulters.

For my ease of math, let's just assume that you had a full fleet of your RK-KD destroyers (22 ships) with 11 T3 modules each.

211 * 125*3 = 79125 potential damage.

Reduced to 1.38% * 79125 = 1091 actual damage per round (Kinetics shoot 4 times per range phase) in the long range.

Now you ask, what are you supposed to do about this?

• I tried to load as both players, it kept trying to connect to the server and failing.
• Your player race image being the sophons is the only thing I could see.
• If the dreadnaught had armor (since it had 6000k, it at least had 1?), it would increase the amount it heals and the defense. I don't believe that bonus is taken into account by the power rating.
• Level bonuses also affect things.
• Fleet wide module buffs can change things, more healing, more defense, etc.
• Not sure why you assuming only 4 ships lost per round per phase. You were being shot at by 4 dreadnaughts & 3 cruisers, so that's a max of 7 per round per phase.
• The combat mechanics were designed following ye olde rock - paper - scissors design. You can't stop the rock defense with extra scissors attack (you can, you just need A LOT of scissors).
• I consistently argue that (virtually) the only targeting style you should use is spread fire. Your battle is a good example. Your ships start shooting the lead ship, but he is the one that is best suited to blocking your attacks (98.6% immune). If you had used spread fire, if his other ships were weaker to Kinetics, you might even have killed some of them. You had a ton of firepower, but it was all wasted. Even if you don't kill anything with spread fire, you wouldn't have killed anything with nosebreaker either. There are some cases where you damage things, but not kill them with spread fire, where you would get some kills with nosebreaker. However, I also advocate having multiple cheap glass cannon fleets, which means that the second fleet can usually manage to clean up the survivors.
• Build the +strategic resource planet exploitation for much hilarity.
• I've even occasionally resorted to building level 1 weapon ships when necessary. I don't learn my pilots names, it saves on the paperwork.
  
  

If the dreadnaught had armor (since it had 6000k, it at least had 1?), it would increase the amount it heals and the defense. I don't believe that bonus is taken into account by the power rating.

Level bonuses also affect things.

Not sure why you assuming only 4 ships lost per round per phase. You were being shot at by 4 dreadnaughts & 3 cruisers, so that's a max of 7 per round per phase.

The combat mechanics were designed following ye olde rock - paper - scissors design. You can't stop the rock defense with extra scissors attack (you can, you just need A LOT of scissors).

I consistently argue that (virtually) the only targeting style you should use is spread fire. Your battle is a good example. Your ships start shooting the lead ship, but he is the one that is best suited to blocking your attacks (98.6% immune). If you had used spread fire, if his other ships were weaker to Kinetics, you might even have killed some of them.

Build the +strategic resource planet exploitation for much hilarity.

.... Again these are just pedantic details to the equation. The real issue here is 98%+ kinetic negation. The rest is just finer points to a foregone conclusion.

I'm assuming 3, because playing the battle over and over again trying different things seems to be about 2.X per combat round so I was just rounding up. It's hard to do an accurate count because of the way they changed the interface showing you only like 5 or 6 ships at a time. I wish I at least had the option of showing my entire fleet so I can observe losses and damage of ships better.

Or to put it another way 9300 Kinetic Offense < 714 Kinetic Defense.

All the strategic resources discovered already have a monopoly in my game by my empire.