I picked up this game a few weeks ago, has Space Base DF9 vibes, and I love it so far; hopefully, the game goes better than Space Base (%^&* Doublefine).
It took me about four tries to get a ship that would work, I did a different approach to manufacturing. I used a similar method to manufacturing, and heavily used trading to get the energy and tech blocks. I focused on Infrablocks early on as they were always in short supply.
Combat is confusing me a bit, I have two turrets, one shield generator, and a structure generator but still can't take a pirate on one on one. I try to ambush them with other ships right now. I also haven't tried tacking any prisoners yet, on my things to do.
Another thing that confuses me so far is why you would want to create more than one ship, there doesn't seem to be any need to have a fleet. Maybe it's a max size thing that I haven't run into yet.
My current ship from last week, it's kind of a bodge right now instead of a nice design, as I just wanted to learn the game mechanics after a couple of times failing
.