Falsely claims retreat was made when 1 small enemy boat was misplaced somewhere / left beyond the combat map range? 0/10.

This game has a ton of potential but it's so incredibly confusing.

I will preface this by saying I got this from a Fanatical Mystery Egg Bundle, in which this was sadly one of the better pulls. This game starts off incredibly strong. But... That's kind of it. The game has voice acting for the first few hours or so, but it seems to die out after awhile and the grammar errors/typos increased as I've played through the game.

I got about halfway through the game, Fleet Power 49 and I'm flying around with the Meadow Hawk Cargo ship or whatever, then I realized, the game is literally just land at city, do whatever, go to city, do whatever, go to next city, land, etc, etc, etc.

The combat is fun when you actually want/end up doing combat, but unfortunately almost all of the combats feel forced. Enemies literally spawn right in front of you so you can't even look away from your screen while you are cruising. It's not a matter of they exist on the map and they go toward you, no, they spawn directly in front of you. I understand technical limitations of not having persistent fleets constantly flying around(Though other games have similar mechanics that still do this kind of thing decently). My biggest gripe is how I can(figuratively) see the code of the game as I am playing, watching them spawn in my path and do circular loops to try and randomly knock their annoying circles of aggro/slowdown(I know you can turn the slowdown part off, but it's not worth it) into me. And what combat there is ends up being more tedious the longer you play the game, rather than the enjoyable combat it was at the beginning, since you know the game is LITERALLY out for you and you have to take manual control to avoid the enemies if you don't want to deal with combat at the moment, such as if you are in the middle of a bunch of commissions and you want to get that done to buy a thing you want. It's the constant fatigue of systems working against the player, instead of for or at least working with the player.

Not to mention the UI and the ship transport systems. It feels incredibly clunky as you are going through menu and nested menu trying to find ships and send ships and remotely buying items, then direct ships to set up cargo runs to bring you items or bring items to locations you need it at, then the whole thing that you can't even set up a singular trip and have to keep track of a ship until it is done with the cargo run to turn off the cargo run since you just needed that one trip of items that one time. Everything feels clunky and like it works against the player, leading to compounding fatigue of systems that just don't want to work with you or for you, only against you.

At the very least, lower fleet power enemies should want to run away, similar fleet power enemies should be hesitant to want to fight you, it doesn't matter if they are pirates or outlaws or not. Realistically they would fight against a weaker fleet or one that isn't stronger than them. It's just so... Tedious. The player is targeted because they are the player without any sort of rhyme or reason, enemies not valuing their lives and throwing a 5 fleet power group against my fleet power of 49, the UI doesn't work with the player, have to manually do many things that could be automated to do a single time.

Don't get me wrong, I really like this game, I enjoy it for what it is, but when you really enjoy something, you have to accept that it has faults and even I can get tired of something I enjoy with enough system fatigue. I enjoy many games that other people might not and I'll probably still open this game up now and again, but I cannot recommend this to others. I enjoy things that some people don't and I can deal with jank, but I know that kind of thing isn't for everyone. So being honest with my review and hoping the game could eventually get better, that would be nice, but this is just my opinion, take it with a grain of salt.