New player´s questions

Hi, I introduce myself in these forums with this post. I have been playing the game for some days and I love it so far. I am really addicted as I hadn´t been with any strategy game in a while. The game looks beautiful and I enjoy the huge variety of ships, abilities, techs, planet improvements, etc. Well, I´m using the pause key a lot (mapped it to one of the buttons in my mouse actually) so I can enjoy the designs and absorb the info leisurely.

I have won a couple of small map games and now I face serious problems after finding my first enemy argonev starbase. In the previous games I had no problem wiping out enemy fleets, using a decent amount of frigates and a couple of capital ships (normal difficulty). But when trying to take that tec planet their starbase absolutely destroyed my fleets, chewing, swallowing and spitting the bones of five capital ships I threw at it. The matter is that it has 14000 hull points and about 3000 shield points. The orkulus that I have in one of my planets doesn´t even reach 3000 hull points, I can´t remember it exactly.

The wiki says that argonevs start with 3000 hull points, but doesn´t specify the number of points added after upgrades. So my question is. is this normal? I know it is, cause it´s in my game. Probably I´m just itchy after wittnessing the utter destruction of 60+ of my ships, five capital ships included. And worse than that, I had barely started to scratch the surface of the thing when the last of my ships retired from the well.

As I said I love the game and I am happy to find this interesting comunity devoted to it. Have fun