I'm playing it fully vanilla and this is my first save. I decided to go into it kind of blind, so please no spoilers. I just look up what mechanics are when I get stuck and have been bumbling through. Just got my first hull parts up at the story base, and was boarding/selling those ice raider ships in profit center Alpha to try to get funding for more blueprints. Using the phase through damage of the Geometric Owl ship they give you in the story to snipe parts and then calling in a big ship to board them. I'm used to a similar flight model from Elite, so the flying and combat part at least was easy for me to pick up. But the whole background simulation bit and the logistics are a learning curve.

I'd seen a few of the small and medium Xenon ships around, and their miners, but I kind of figured the NPCs would take care of them for a while. Then I see 2 K's and an I come on radar and just melt a construction ship. I had two prizes waiting to sell and they were coming for the shipyard they were limping to. (I wound up saving one at least. And the shipyard.) Figured I would try doing the same module sniping shenanigans to them.

Hoo boy, that was a lot of save/loads. Finally managed to do it by crippling the K's and then tricking the I into blasting them out of the sky. By the time I had the engines and shield generators and most of the big plasma turrets down, a big Terran fleet showed up and finished it off for me. Which was lucky on two counts, if the plasma guns on that were still alive, it would have eaten them up.

I don't think any of the NPC fleets I've seen in the game to this point would have been able to take those things on without intervention, and I don't have anything more potent than a handful of captured minotaurs. I'm wondering whether it is that they basically decided to rush an assault and might be lagging on economy for a while, so I can catch back up or if there are going to be constant waves of these things, and everything will be overrun. I kind of want to get all of the story missions done on the first save if I can.