Hi all, I noticed a number of you are finding the difficulty quite high for this game. Having won 3 times, including once with the small "nuke runner" ship, I have put together some tips to help you be more successful.

Presets:
- Keep in mind the food costs when assigning crew to labs (or scanner). Even if they have 6+ science, if their food cost is 13, it is probably the wrong guy.
- While it may be tempting to put your lowest food cost crew as the pilot on your peaceful preset, make sure you have at least 1 pilot that stays pilot for both peaceful and combat presets. You don't need all your systems (including shields) shutting down when you switch to combat mode.
- Don't forget to man that sensor module. More scanning power means less fuel used to sweep through a star
- Spread your repair and fire drones out. Besides doing their job faster, this helps them avoid getting hit by nukes, which always hit dead center ship.

Ship type:
Adjust your play style to the ship you are using
- If you are using the research ships, avoid unnecessary fights early. You make plenty of cash just from exploring. Consider bringing a rat crew for cheaper buying your way out of sector 1 fights.
- If you are playing a small ship, use that to your advantage. Invest in good ACM modules and pilots and make most of the enemy shots miss your ship.
- If you are playing a massive ship, don't sweat evasion. Instead of focusing ACM and pilots, opt for shields and defense turrets, or as I like to do, just go for overwhelming firepower.

Modules:
- Nukes always hit dead center ship. Do not put vital combat modules or fragile modules center ship.
- Swap modules often. As you get towards mid game, have peaceful and combat modules ready to swap. This lets you have more peaceful and more combat modules with limited space.
-- Mosey up to the edge of the enemy scan distance, swap to all your combat modules, and step in.
-- While in a fight, swap out or simply store as many storage modules as possible. They serve no purpose but hp during fights, and are mainly a liability.
-- If you are playing a smaller ship, this becomes an absolute necessity as there is just not enough space for a good storage and strong combat capability.
-- You cannot be dragged into a fight while at a trading post. Use this to your advantage. Sprint for the trading post in peaceful setup, take your time to gear up for combat, and leave the post.

Weapons:
- Crew killing weapons are garbage. This isn't FTL. Your dreams of bio beaming the enemy to death are dead. Weapons are too inaccurate, damage to modules too powerful, and offense in general too strong to play games trying to kill crew.
- Explosive weapons are OP, but watch your explosive stash. Explosive weapons ignore shields and are low power with little drawback. This makes them ideal for smaller ships with limited options. However, fully relying on them will mean you need to buy every bit of explosive you lay eyes on. Even then, you will still need to at least partially transition during spideraa sector as supplies are limited.
- At the start of the fight, look at your targets. Press B to easily locate power systems. Determine if it is better to target power or weapons. Targetting power can give you a swift total victory, but is often all or nothing. Targetting weapons can reduce the damage you take faster, but there are more to hit, and sometimes they are near the edge of the ship, making more shots miss entirely.
- If there is a shieldless ship, hit it with your lasers, while your missiles/emp soften up the shielded ship.
- Unless there are easy targets to soften multiple ships at once, focusing mostly on one ship at a time (usually weakest first) seems to work best. This eliminates the crew aboard and stops the damaged modules from being repaired and becoming a threat again.

Misc:
- Keeping extra food storage space can reward you. Large scale food harvest can often fill up ALL your food storage.
- You don't have to stop the final death beam from firing to win the game, but the ending text (and maybe score) is better if you do.
- Crydream recorders actually give decent income. I could be wrong, but the 2-man "lovers" type seems to give the most creds per person of the dream recorders.
- If you have a high eco ship, it is often better to slow travel from star to star rather than warping for the extra profit.