During the end my first run playing cosmoteer yesterday, I noticed some problems. The game was fairly early on, with me easily overcoming each amateur planet I went to. Eventually, I did run out of amateur class enemies so I started fighting professionals. While I did win most battles (losing resulted in me loading in from the previous save point, modifying my ship, and trying again), the repair and FTL fuel cost soon became more expensive than the credits earned per win.
While the need for repairs can be nullified with excess shields, ftl fuel costs can be reduced with smaller ships, and the difficulty can be reduced with, well... competence, this would lead to the only effective ship designs being component spams inside tight rectangles.
I don't see the game thriving in its current state, do I do have some suggestions to the problems I stated. The spawn point should have what I would describe as rings of difficulty around it, with amateur being in the center of the circle and vanguard being on the outer edges. This would allow one to slowly build up their ship (and skills) on the inner circles or just rush to the hard outer areas at will. The cost to repair armor should also be drastically reduced, because as of right now, the money earned from bounties practically has a heavy tax- in the form of repairing armor. Also, I feel like either the amount of credits earned per bounty or the amount of enemies on a planet need to be increased in order to cover repairs while making mid-late game behemoths possible.
I hope these suggestions will be considered and/or implemented in order to make the game more beginner friendly, if nothing else.
