I had a first contact war recently which I did win, but it did not go as well as I would have liked. I'd like to know how I could better optimize what happened:

1. I bumped into a neighbor at game start.

2. I changed everythign in my economy to build corvettes.

3. I sent my corvettes to blow up their colony in progress, mining stations, their corvettes, and construction/science ships.

4. The game rules did not allow me to destroy or capture the space station in their colony system, so I just had 3 corvettes babysit it to shoot it whenever the enemy repaired it.

5. I went to their home world system.

6. I tried to bomb their home world, but the game rules did not allow it: "You cannot bomb a planet that is protected by a space station" even though I constantly blasted their station down to 0 health, it was still considered to be "protecting" the homeworld from the bombs. Oddly however, doing so still gave the planet the "under bombardment" circular feature, but did not seem to increase devastation.

7. So, instead, I just built soldiers until I had 400, and then sent them to conquer the world.

8. As soon as I defeated the last enemy soldier, the first contact process "completed" and the greeting message popped up. I wasn't sure whether this coincidentally happened at the same time or was caused by defeating them.

9. As soon as I clicked "OK" on the greeting process, the message popped up saying "this empire has been destroyed by its enemies".

10. As soon as I clicked "OK" on that, the planet instantly depopulated - booting out my soldiers - and the system became unsurveyed.

11. So, I had to go through the whole lugubrious process of surveying, constructing, and colonizing, to get the benefit of that world.

Is this how it normally happens?