I'm not exactly certain about that, but I have never been overtaken by them while grinding.
One of the reasons why I love this game is because it is designed to be frequently paused (spacebar), which I do often. Then I get to run through everything I have in my toolbox: power allocation, crew positioning, target priority, damage control, and so on. After a while, I got better at being able to pull a rabbit out of my hat in really tight battles because rather than fighting them out in realtime, I paused, sometimes several times in a second, in order to stay alive.
The game can be played like an RTS, without pausing, but there is no way I could keep up.
Another really fascinating part of the game is that it is possible to fight one's way all the way to the boss with a configuration that cannot win against the boss, or has a very low chance of winning, because the boss uses things you haven't seen yet like drone swarms and missile barrages. There are so many ways to die, some of them truly infuriating, like forgetting to re-power the oxygen supply and suffocating your own crew, which I have done. Those darkly humorous lessons are definitely a huge part of the game.
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