Bret Devereaux

Yeah it is not at all beginner friendly and expects you to learn via a lot of trial and error. There are a lot of neat features that are completely undocumented, like how you can hide from radar by landing. And the difficulty curve is backwards - it gets easier, not harder.

In particular the game doesn't quite know what to do if the player carves out an area of the map and then intentionally lures and hunts the strike groups out of range of their supporting missiles and aircraft. Eventually they try to pull back to Khiva, but too late.

I think this is what the game intends for you to do, as leaving SG's alone makes Khiva+ensuing phase insanely difficult. The problem is that it communicates this poorly and instead pushes you towards a rush to Khiva. Hidden cities are also super swing-ey.

It also really doesn't help that it's mechanically built as a roguelite while (in recent patches) stunting the new game+ mechanisms that are critically to making roguelites fun. It's the blessing and curse of one man studios-- unique vision with major gameflow flaws.

Self-designed ships also throw the balance quite a bit. I ended up designing everything in my starting fleet, building around planned task-forces with set top-speeds for specific tasks and keeping weight and fuel consumption low and it made everything a lot easier.

It's more than a little awkward that your flagship is absolutely terribly designed for what you need to be doing and the smart play is to either immediately rip almost everything off of it or else custom design a new one (and edit its file to give it the flagship tag)

It's like a lot of realistic games. The immersive thing is that all the in-game ships make perfect sense as designed in universe. The Sevastopol is pretty much a perfect core of a battle group. The problem is that the game deviates from the logic of in the in-game world.

This game screams out to be a turn based/RTWP game in the tactical layer, the problem is it's instead a physics heavy arcade game with a strategic layer that is insanely punishing of any real mistakes/attrition.