[dogscoff]

Actually, I hit them with armour&shield skipping temporal weapons until the SDD was destroyed, then moved in the boarding ship.

In fact all that armour makes this tactic easier - If you're not lucky enough to take out the SSD early, you can just completely gut the internals (including SDD) without much danger of utterly destroying the ship because the organic armour is left 'til Last. You can then mothball the ship and repair the non-organic components.

It's a bit gamey playing the AI like this in tactical, but I've given it plenty of help already (Ai has high bonus and 3000 racial points, but I've only taken temporal and then the space wasters trait.) and I need every advantage I can get.