The first 10 levels or so are a struggle. You'll likely have to reference the internet to figure out what should be relatively simple stuff. There's a bajillion different items in the game, and it's not clear what's necessary and what's junk. Storage space will be incredibly limited at first. There's a thousand different skills in the tree, and some of them are confusing as hell. (Gastronomy? Why the **** am I grinding this game to master gastronomy? WTF is Xenosociology? Botany?)
Upgrading your weapons, gear, ship, etc. is really satisfying, but man is it complicated. Want to do something as simple as add a scope to your gun? Well, you have to level up to unlock the weapon engineering skill, then kill 5 bad guys, then go to the Research station to unlock the ability to use optics. But wait! First you'll need 40 different elements to unlock the research, and they weigh a ton so you can only carry 2 at a time. And now look, ****ing Sarah is using the weapons bench, you'll have to wait your turn.
Ship design is just as complicated.
But then, after you hit level 20 or so, you turn into something of a god. By that point, you'll have a collection of unique guns that just slay fools with ease. I wouldn't bother trying to level up many of the combat skills, because they simply aren't necessary. Other than the real heavy hitters like the Terrormorphs(**** those guys), you'll be mowing through waves of pirates and spacers with ease. I actually bumped the difficulty up to Hard because it got to easy.
The spaceship combat was the only aspect I really had any trouble with. At first it's confusing as hell juggling your energy allotment to all the various categories. Took a while to get a comfortable key binding config that worked. Every time I was matched against 3 enemy ships, I'd die right away. So, I went and did the Vanguard mission and used the training simulator multiple times(Thanks, Fraz). Went grinding out the necessary requirements to bump up skills related to starship combat. Now with my upgraded ship, I'm pretty much untouchable in space as well.
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