I need to revise my earlier comment: The game IS TOO HARD. I could easily beat it on Hard before but now I can't on Normal. At the very least consider making 4 difficulty levels with another between the current Easy & Normal (call Normal Hard & Hard Insane) or I think users will give you low app store ratings for being too hard.
Long version: With the BSE Armada as my main ship and 2 BSE Liberators as wingmen I'm barely surviving on galaxy 3 on normal. Example 1: I entered very close to 1 enemy ship (3rd galaxy) and it destroyed a BSE Liberator with 3 fully upgraded shield generators before my 3 ships and 10 fighters could finish that single enemy ship. Example 2: My fleet finally fought its way to a space station but it had 2 enemy ships in it when I entered. The 2 enemies destroyed the space station before my fleet could stop them. The stations need to be stronger if they can't survive against 2 enemies with 3 very upgraded, high level ships fighting with them.
Shields seem less useful than before. I shred through enemy shields so fast the blue lines just vanish - even with specifically choosing weapons and upgrading them for maximum hull damage. On my side, extra shields from generators only slightly improve ship durability since enemies use so many "ignore shields" weapons that my hulls are usually almost gone by the time my shields are failing. One solution to this would be hull upgrades which seems sorely missing from the game.
The quickness with which ships can get destroyed and the slowness with which they can move removes any formation strategy. Regardless of where you put the ships, a enemy can enter on the "weak side" of the formation and destroy a ship before you have any chance of moving other ships in the path of the endless rocket volleys and absorb damage for the wingman ship. And I mean a BSE Liberators wingman - I can't even imagine playing this game with the starter ships on Normal. This makes ship survival mostly about where the enemies and your ships appear on the map.
Grinding for resources takes too long on Normal. And this is if you stay near a station for free repairs. Since the only way to survive away from a station on Normal is to have about as strong a fleet as the game currently allows. You end up slowly building up just to move on. On one hand this can add to the difficulty but it makes it less a pick up and play game. I'm currently 6 hours into a single game on Normal as a poor random placement has taken out a BSE Liberator 3X and it's like well there goes 15K of scrap and more upgrades than I want to think about...
Resources for missions are too low. You can often get more resources for killing enemies on a random star than completing a mission. It seems silly to get 10-20X the resources just getting to the star where you are starting the mission than the mission itself.
