Engage cloak right after the first enemy shot. Odds of them hitting are low (25%?), and then hitting on the weapons even lower. Unless they have some of the fastest weapons, you get the glaive shot in before they can shoot again. This works very well until enemies have 2 shields and your glaive can'...

Defense drone costs 50 scrap and shoots down missiles pretty reliably (also shoots asteroids). MkII costs 75 and shoots down lasers too, but may let missiles through while doing that. Don't go to shop beacons before you have 50 scrap (or something to sell to make that number). Upgrading engines impr...

Well, I gave it a shot with DA-SR 12 and got to the second round vs boss. I had pretty good luck, but crucially found no defense drones at all. Second boss round is the hardest because of the attack drones. I think you must have defense drone mkII. You need 4 shields and a teleporter to win this gam...

Has anyone beaten the game without shield system? I think even the boss should be beatable without shields if you have very good other systems. Obviously a lot of luck is needed to get there!

For solar flare fights it helps to vent most of the ship right away. Any fires will go out pretty fast. It's very unlikely to miss all shops for an entire sector if you choose your path wisely. You can usually check (go next to) almost every beacon. It's easy to get in a vicious cycle of spending al...

For my first victory, both ships got destroyed. I didn't get the achievement for beating the boss, but I did get my win.

I would upgrade teleporter to lvl3, because you have only 2 spots in it and you want to send at least 4 depending on what species they are. Try to have at least 65 scrap before visiting stores. Recruit any crew you can find, engi and zoltan are poor fighters, human and slug are fine, mantis and rock...

Depends on the ship. I believe some ships are near 100% win with perfect play. On the other hand something like DA-SR 12 can often get impossible scenarios.

I've had stalemate situations when out of fuel vs various rebel ships and they eventually jumped away. I guess they forgot to add this behavior to some ships.

No, not looking to mod it myself.

As mentioned The Merchant Cruiser by zaratustra is very close to this.