I'm in a stupid cycle of having to take low risk missions that pay peanuts for hours to buy a single upgrade and having to get several upgrades to drop the risk level of the main missions, because anything average or above just demolishes me in seconds.

I guess I just consistently put together bad builds or something, I don't know, but like this last one was an average risk and as soon as I set foot in the mission space, I get dozens of missiles fired out me, which overwhelms the deflectors and then kills me in seconds.

I even jumped forward a system to buy better weapons than I'm supposed to have and it's just not helping.

Then there's the resource market but that's not really reliable. I've made tons in it but then you get those dumb cases where the price spike ends before you can get back with the resources or whatever. It's still been a lot more dependable than like $4k for a low risk mission though.

Ah, in the next system over (Garibaldi), they also had defense upgrades, which made me more or less invincible for the time being, lol. So I'm good.

Are you using the shield? This is not the built in deflectors, but the shield. It keeps you from firing but also makes you pretty much untouchable. When missiles are about to hit you hold down the space button and it activates a very strong shield. The shield is very strong but you can't fire out of it either. It also have a very short duration and the more damage it absorbs the shorter the duration remaining. Once you let go of the space bar and deactivate the shield then you have to wait for it to recharge which takes some time. I can see that if you don't know about the shield and just tank the missiles you will die a lot.

I think you have it backwards--the deflector is the one you have to use manually.

But either way, yes, before getting next-system defenses, deflector, shields, armor and HP would all be kaput in seconds on any Average risk mission.

The difficulty of the game grows with the value of your ship.
So, don't rush to the bigger ship, first buy the more advanced weapons.

Yes, this game has some weird difficulty spikes, I almost ragequitted when I was around 10 hours in, couldn't get campaign missions done, couldn't do pretty much anything without dying actually XD

You can grind easier missions to upgrade weapons and defenses, also, here's some tips that you may or may not know, and worked for me.

- Hire a mercenary to go with you, I only found out about this late in the game, you can hire one in any bar, guess I should have gone to bars more often.

- When you approach a mission, don't get to close, exit warp and approach slowly, keep pressing F to use the pulse and get an idea where the enemies are. Go closer and when they start chasing get back again, the idea is to lure fewer ships and fight then one or 2 at a time.

- If you're in a hot zone with lots of enemies, have 1 of your weapons and/or the mercenary AI set to fighters, while you keep circling the area focusing your attacks on bigger ships, when you see in the map there's not many smaller fighters left, set them to any ship.

- Later in the game when you start fighting bigger ships, I just leave the weapon's AI to Targeted only, then I target one ship with Z on keyboard to have it destroyed faster, this worked much better than leaving then set to any ship.

- When you just want to travel and avoid fights, set the weapon's AI to targeted only, this way, if enemy ships get you out of warp speed, you won't waste weapons automatically firing then, and you can get some distance from the enemies and keep going where you are going.

- On stations, check your surplus often and sell everything that you don't need.

It became easy once I figured out some things:

- scaling isn't really that big of a deal. The plot missions don't seem to scale so as you upgrade your ship you'll see that the difficulty for whatever plot mission you're on slowly starts to go down.

- I set the turrets to fire at whatever they wanted. Does a decent job dealing with the fighters. The broadside is also surprisingly accurate against fighters.

- I normally prioritized fighters before the capital ships. Those little bastards can whittle you down if you're not paying attention to your shield indicator. Once they're dealt with...

- the closer you are, the less accuracy matters. So get right in there and spam your broadsides against the larger ships. Basically, anything that isn't a fighter is fair game for this tactic. Once their shields drop, the enemy capital ship is toast within seconds unless it's one of the giant ships. Mind your shields as you do this, and...

- use the deflector early and often. It seems to block everything except leech weapons, and you don't have to leave it on very long. So if a missile salvo is incoming, hit spacebar for a few seconds until they just wash over the deflector, then let 'em have it with your broadside. Also works well when the enemy capital ships are shooting a broadside at you, especially their beam weapons.

- when the deflector is active, it seems like your shields recharge really quickly. So if one shield drops, hold the deflector until the shield recharges, then release and spam the broadsides again.

- I didn't find any particular need to upgrade to a much larger ship. Got through the game with just the Tennhausen using the tactics above.

- leech weapons don't seem to affect your booster, so if you've been leeched to a near standstill then just use your boost instead.

- when just flying around, spam your scanner every 10 seconds or so. You can sometimes find cargo in the middle of nowhere. It'll also help you find bounty targets, which is easy money plus loot.

- when in warp, drop out to deal with the Mayday calls. Also easy money since it's usually only a small number of enemy ships, and you're getting help from the folks you're rescuing.

To sum all that up, my basic advice is to take out the fighters first, watch your shields, use your deflector as a sort of instant invulnerability, and get in close to the big ships and spam your broadsides until it goes kablooey.