Cosmoteer :
https://walternaterealities.itch.io/cosmoteerI went with the regular mode (not the creative one) and after beating down many enemy ships with my starting lonely vessel on the easier sectors, after getting some more ship to join into my fleet i started to go after harder locations.
Making then more money from the stronger targets and slowly affording some bigger ships to join the fray.
But harder is also costly, lost many ships too, and repairs isn't cheap.
Fortunately bigger targets deliver even more money so you can keep up and add new ships to replace the lost ones (sell the "too expansive to repair" guys , you may then be able to have enough money for a good replacement ship).
So at some point i felt my fleet was powerfull enough and went after the hardest sectors (one of the red "vanguard" difficulty one) .
Destroyed an enemy that wasn't much to my surprise , then faced a bigger vessel
My good Constellation class ship (it's one made after the Star Trek one) that served me so well so far was heavily hurt as this enemy wasn't joking at all, oddly the Constellation could still fight tough at a very weak capacity, while my Spork warships (they reminded me of the Homeworld Kadesh "needle" mothership that's why i bought them) with their very nice continous laser were starting to dig into the heavy protections of the enemy juggernault
But while it was going slowly in my favor despite my fleet was getting hurt, what i underestimated was the last enemy ship of that sector, at some point it decided to join the battle instead of flying around.
And wow, it was the biggest warship i saw so far, it annihilated 2 of my Sporks that bravely bought me time to get the FTL drives of my ruined Constellation and the last Spork + my starter ship that was still alive fully charged, so i jumped away to an empty sector to repair.
After that i attacked lesser sectors (though out of one in Professional difficulty, the sectors left were on Veteran and Elite difficulty) to remake some money and managed to build up again my fleet, this time i spared enough money to get some big guns.
Once i felt ready, i went back to the sector that kicked my warship sorry bottoms.
And wow, i didn't expected that, as my fleet jumped right next the huge enemy warship, so while they were not yet all powered up (for the big ships their shields weren't even available yet) the enemy was having a lot of fun shooting.
The Umbrage juggernault , the strongest of my ships (and the most expansive one), took the worst spanking with his pants down, as seen in the screenshot (and on the upper top of it) it's a miracle it wasn't fully destroyed as it lost a heavy majority of its components.
Fortunately while the Umbrage was being slowly annihilated, my other warships went back online and delivered a very good beating to the enemy.
After lot of damage in my fleet, the enemy was finally destroyed, we then annihilated the derelict enemy left (the one from the 1st screenshot that despite incapacited was still alive when we ran away)
The big money earned allowed me to replace the lost Umbrage by a Hammerhead shark - like big warship
Was happy that my starter ship was still in one piece, can't believe it survived the ordeal