I, too dont like the system at the moment. If you think about it its stupid that your ships need 1 movementpoint to fly 1 parsec kill 1 ship and fly back to where they came from... It would make more sense to force you to fight ALL ships and fleets one after another unless you invest another movementpoint to retreat.
Yeah, those things are useless... If they would give you a little boost on your defense and prevent the use of special invasion tactics they could become somewhat usefull ( 1 preventing Gaswarefare, 2 preventing Gaswarefare and Tidal desruption for example).
Well I only played one game completly, but every civilization got at least one of theese things. I that was pretty annoying becaus tech rating was very slow and everyone had only 2 atk and 0 def ships when i got one with 40 atk and something around 35 def. I diddnt liked it but had to use it since there wasnt any other way to kill the precusor ship of the other civilizations.. Maybe its just another problem with the german version
