I made an error in my math and looking at it (Its hard to see things on mobile, I thought its resource cost was the PDS's, but the energy cost was higher), so I apologize for that.
And we didn't win. We killed their flagship and they ran off to regroup. How can you call it a victory for so many we lost? As far as I know, the war never ended because we're still under threat of them coming. They don't want to conquer us, they want to wipe us out.
And the difference between energy and resources is we're almost at our peak with our infrastructure but we can get more resources as time goes on. If you're willing to waste 10 turns to even out the resource deficiency by renouncing the population act, then you can wait 5 turns before we implement it. Plus, most resource costs for the most part, are 20 or under. We make 16 per turn, which is 8 turns to make 20 resources per turn which means we can easily make most of our projects right away.
I will change my proposal to
Build one defender fleet. We need energy for research and structures, and we need them as soon as possible. The systems research will probably help us immensely, and when we start to delve into the other parts, we might have ships that stand a fighting chance (and our defenders will more than likely become work vessels). It also makes for good practice to have an even number, so that in the cases we NEED to do salvage runs, we can send three groups instead of 2 and 1/2.
I forgot to add some lines at the beginning and sneakingly added them in. I think dropping construction this turn would be a good idea to allow us to learn from the enemy... And also maybe figure out their weak spots.
We should at least build the minimum. We will still make a profit of resources and energy.
Is nobody interested in the Xeno Ship Systems? They may have superior energy generation and there is the possibility we can jury-rig some planetside power plants based on ship mechanics. It's worth a try to reserve-engineer what we can from a vastly superior technology base. Of course, this is more of a long term investment, since we really don't have the energy for it, but I think it's worth a gamble.
Ultimately, Defender Fleets aren't the greatest and are only really useful for debris hunting, given their poorer stats, while the MK 0.5 has already the same stats without any xenology research, while also being cheaper.
We might want to conserve energy for research.
I don't beleive we have enoguh energy to do it right now. Next turn, if we go with just one fleet, we should have enough to research the systems (which I fully support).
If we get a PDS, we won't have enough energy to do it.