I have been a big fan of this game, always finding out new capabilities and strategies. I have however been rather disappointed with the extended edition however. It does have a LOT of new content, but the content is designed to "suck".
Thusly, the game balance is thrown quite a bit off because of so much suck piling on top of each other, with very little things to actually aid the player or balance the scales.
Lets look...
1) Caches - Mostly trapped now. A new feature that only sucks for the player. Rewards are the same as before.
2) New terrain. Sucks for the player. Causes trouble advancing due to inability to repair. Incurs repair bills needlessly. Blows up your fighters, drains shields, thus causing more losses due to lack of readiness. Halts you so enemies can dogpile you.
Really causes problems escaping from failed fights.
3) Weapon balance. Mostly sucks for player. No more turbo-particle cannon spam for a relatively cheap way to get up and going. No more burst megaplasma fun.
4) Enemies run away. Sucks cuz you have to chase them, lose out on turns, or just lose out on cash.
5) Space stations have random items for sale which is more realistic and interesting. But it sucks because before you were guaranteed MegaPlasma guns. Now you get mediocre junk usually.
6) Smarter AI = sucks for player.
7) Crazy spawning fighter madness where enemy spits out like 20 of them. wtf? Sucks.
8) Roving bands of nemesis that warp in right on top of you. Ok, this is about same as last time but is the most common way to die lategame.
9) More factories = more roving warships earlier. Much less time to plink at fighter groups to scavenge cash and explore before running into ships you LITERALLY cannot damage (on hard due to no money).
10) Tougher bases = good opportunity to lose. Lost vs the nemesis bases. Despite screens of fighters, etc, they simply blasted my main ship with long range energy weapons and I lose in 4 seconds. Yay.
11) Harder quests. They are more intricate and yet pay the same. This sucks.
This adds up to a very frustrating game. I CANNOT IMAGINE trying to play this game as a level 1 noob with Nightengale!!
I can BARELy put up a winning game with a freaking Capitol ship or heavy carrier. Even on easy. Something ALWAYS seems to come up.
On medium I usually dont make it to the 3rd map.
Here are a few ideas to mitigate this:
1) Difficulty should NOT have such a huge impact on cash initially. Hard is just ridiculous as you have to find a cache or you cant even hurt enemy big ships. Medium is fairly bad.
2) More ways to get to select advanced weapons. I would add a new friendly Merchant ship that has 3 slots filled and offers money-quests instead of mercenary rewards.
Stations could be 9 slots instead of 4, with a weapon for each category. INCLUDING decent POINT DEFENSE options.
It is too annoying to find great weapons that dont fit your current strategy but would have been great last game, etc.
3) The "reward item" at the end of a map is kind of a joke. It is only marginally better than a stock weapon. Needs much better stats.
