At a certain point the game decides to turn into a parody of its own mechanics by adding a "support" enemy that can:
1. Disable your ship's defenses to both of the longest range weapon types in the game, which all enemies hold one or the other of, causing the AI to fire all of them at the same ship at once and kill it with no possible defense.
2. Halve a ship's energy allotment, which they use to both move and shoot. Oh, and did I mention this enemy type has such high evasion and health scores you have to move in close or fire multiple times to kill them... both of which require energy. Also your best counter is a sniper unit which
cannot fire period if they decide to use this ability on her.
3. Repair enemies, which of course makes them almost invincible at long range.
4. Do all of the above, at infinite range with no possible defense. The only exception is that repairing has limited range (irrelevant since it targets allies) and you have a unit which can clear debuffs, which doesn't matter because the supports act first in the enemy turn and all of the debuffs will have already had an entire turn's worth of impact by the time you clear them.
This is all fine and well when there's one or two of them, as each individual unit can only use two of those abilities per turn. Still can result in BS if they randomly decide to use their abilities in a smart way, but if you were going to win overwhelmingly it doesn't matter.
However, they follow up the mission these enemies are introduced with, with an "assault carrier". This is the highest health standard unit that's appeared thus far, which can spawn two of these guys per turn
but might choose not to. It literally comes down to a dice roll. In this mission, which is the only mission in the entire game thus far where you are not allowed to upgrade your units before, they start off with two assault carriers on the field, and then quickly spawn them on 3 different sides of the map so far apart you could never cover them all. In my first playthrough, the only assault carrier which appeared far away from my units spawned almost a dozen support units, which proceeded to lock down my entire fleet so badly that they couldn't kill the carrier units faster than they were repaired.
Literally every enemy on the battlefield was spawned either by a scripted event or a carrier.