This is from a standpoint of playing the Hard difficulty which i understand most people dont play, if the achievements are anything to go by, only 0.7% finished the game on hard, but these flaws are still applied to the other difficulties, its just that the Hard difficulty makes the game flaws absurdly enhanced and very obvious

The combat of the game operates on Rock, Paper, Scissors, and there are a multitude of ways to tweak the flow of the combat, however, there are various horrendous design decisions that simply get in the way of the fun on the combat and completely break the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" idea.

But what KILLSthis game is the Roguelike mechanics. They are fundamentally unnecessary OR at the very least in need of heavy tweaking, there are not enough random events to go by, couple of retries and you start to the same things very fast, and the randomness of the Roguelike mechanics are tied into the story, but i dont care about the story at that point when the roguelikes mechanics lead you into Resource starvation, leading into combats that i cannot win because i simply got too unlucky and im not strong enough, because you CONSTANTLY roll the dice, need Scrap ? Get lucky and get enough fuel to go to ground signals, get lucky once again that the crew you have now will be the dice rollers you need, if you are a ship that has no navigation upgrades ? better start praying you get the stuff you need

Chapter 3 ? Pray that you have enough scrap for 3 Squadron slots and an Aurora
Chapter 4 ? Not that difficult, but getting lucky and having a Parasite drone can drastically speed up things
Chapter 5 and 6 ? You better be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lucky and not only have all slots but atleast one ship fast and capable of DPSing the enemy battleships

The inability to have a reliable money source, (And the only "reliable" money source being having an elite crewmember WHICH ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GOES ON COOLDOWN IF YOU DARE LOSE OR WIN!???!?! is not enough).

Paired with the fact that even IF you get enough upgrades you might lack the ships you NEED for that fight, because you cannot win unless you have exactly what you need, since all boss sectors are heavily stacked against you, Their squadrons always are more upgraded, they can have over 100 squadrons so if you go for attrition they last for a very long time, so the Rock, paper, Scissors suddenly stop working if they have, say 5 scissors who upon attacking, stun, deal damage and have 7.7 DPS, which is most of the time more than any of your ships, which is why you need the Rock Aurora who stop them from doing any of that, if you dont have it, its going to be horrendously more difficult.
The game is okay, just dont play it on Hard.

works