1 experience level per ship killed! Bug?

Yea, I have this happen quite often, Usually large hulled ships I make in the beginning-mid portion of the game that I keep around and don't upgrade (because they usually don't need to be). They usually end up having like 200-300 hp's or more, and since they are so old they never get shot at in a fleet (since those ships weapons are like 25 attack / 15 defense, yet after all the levels, and weapons/defense bonuses they usually come out being able to deal a descent amount of damage), and newer ships always take the brunt from their fleet attack/defense modules.

I've had small hulled ships that have reached excessive high levels, from it destroying huge stacks of fleets that just keep attacking (since the AI does no power check to see if it will win or not). I had a small hull go up to 150 or more hp's. (with no hitpoint modules added) in like 5 turns.

I think (but am not sure) that the amount of experience gained is relative to how 'current or up-to-date' the ship is. So huge hulled state-of-the-art uber ships will not gain hardly anything (Dread Lords gain very little themselves unless they beat another uber ship).

But older ships that have survived a long time, have become pretty powerful due to their level gaining. But they keep gaining a ton of experience, because they are still outdated and most likely have very very old weapons and defenses on them.

I did a post on experience but I can't find it at the moment, so I'm probably going to be misquoting myself.

The amount of experience you gain is directly related (i.e. equivalent) to how much firepower/defense the ship you kill has.  If I kill a ship with 5 attack/2 defense, I'll gain 7 experience.  If I have 6 attack on my own ship, that will be enough to level me, but then the next level will take me 8 experience to gain (from memory).  The initial amount of experience necessary is 1+your total attack/defense, and it increases by one with each level.

So unless you're encountering AI ships with very low attack and very high defense and your ship has very low attack and very low defense and is simply winning due to their defense being off-type, you shouldn't ever see anything like what is described in the OP.

This isn't what I'm experiencing, I'm used to normal levelling, this was a medium sized ship beating a single fighter and gaining a level.

Even when my ship was at level 40 it would still gain a level for each fighter killed.

I say ship, there were about half a dozen exhibiting the same behaviour, yet others of the same type would just level up normally.

Interesting...

Were any of these medium ships formerly on survey duty?

I had always assumed the captain's logs anomalies simply gave +experience, but it's possible they also give an experience multiplier for future battles.  I had honestly never looked into that, though it would seem to be the most valid explanation.

And what, again, was the firepower & defense of the ship that was leveling, compared to the ships it was killing?

No survey ship conversions, all original warship builds.

2/0/0 : 0/0/6 : 20HP vs 0/0/2 : 0/0/0 : 8HP