You know, just a couple of days ago i started doing what you say at the end, because i always was without credits after every single battle. Turns out, i end up with no credits anyway. Why? Because i am also paying for the enemy's free squadrons i destroy.

I try to spend my money before I attack in a space battle, so I get down to zero money and then start sending in my fleet before the month ends. 2-3 Green bars before the month ends should be fine.

frankly since so many people have issues with this they need to get rid of it. If you can't play how you want you lose alot of the fun factor. I get balance but this is too far sicne the game was never designed for credit producign in battle.

Yeah, Rebels get kinda hammered by the attrition system. Fighters in general tend to take severe casualties in EAW, so you need to be constantly replacing them to maintain your force. The attrition system just means that your already struggling economy is further beset by constantly being reduced to zero money after each battle. That just ties into a problem with the independent planets tending to have lots of light ships, which generally means lots of point defense which means lots of attrition.

The worst part about the attrition system though is that it just doesn't work. All you need to do to get around it is attack when you have no money, so long as you do that it doesn't effect you. So the only way to not get wrecked by the system is to intentionally bypass it, otherwise you simply wont have enough money to fight the AI on higher difficulties.

The only way I can see to fix it is to either drastically increase fighter durability, which will have commensurate effects on game balance, drastically reduce the costs inflicted by their loss, or drastically increase the amount of resources you get.