I was playing a game on a lan with my friend against 2 hard AI. One was Advent, and when it actaully came time for a real battle against my fleet and theirs, something strange and rather annoying happend. When I first met up with them, I started making quick work of them and finally selected to attack their capital ship once I was in range.

Here is where it gets kind of weird. The capital ship was regenerating it's shield faster than I could hurt it. That isn't the bad part, as I figured it was just some annoying ability that would turn off in about a minute or so, but I was wrong. The shield continued to just rise and rise, way past it's max shield value to around 7000. At this point, I changed targets to a normal frigate, and it did the same thing. I kept this up trying to kill possibly whatever was doing this, but just couldn't find anything that I could actually do damage to. I ended up with about 3 of there ships destroyed with my fleet in ruins.

After they wiped me out, and when they finally came for me on my home world, my friend and me both went to defend it to have the same thing happen....but even worse. This time, some of their ships where reaching the 20k's and one drone host had over 45k in shield strength. Basically, they were invulnerable. Finally at 15 min. into the battle, they began to lose shield but it was still up in the many thousands from before. So, we had to work guys down from insanely high shield values, which in the end killed us.

Here is my question, is this a valid tactic? Are they stacking some strange effects that I don't know about or is it just an exploit/glitch? I would think that going over the max shield value would be a little too powerful if this is a real tactic.

Also, I did read about how you shouldn't post glitches or strange exploits, but as my question states, I'm not sure if this classifies as one.

EDIT: I waited about 3 hours for my replay to finally catch up and I got some pictures from the game including the fabled 45K+ Drone Host!