It seems to me that there are some serious balance issues in this game. The Single Player Story Missions seem to be extremely hard, at least several of those leading in and out of Britonian space. But the jobs you can get off the job boards in the bars in this timeframe tend to be total cakewalks in comparison. This makes for very frustrating gameplay. The problem with this is that your practice against weak enemies in between the story missions does little to prepare you for the primary battles in the story missions. I just arrived in Kusari space, and the missions once again are a total cakewalk. The GC and Blood Dragons are just too easy to blow away, and I know the next story mission is probably going to be magnitudes harder.

I'm sure one argument for this style is that the Story Missions should be harder. While that makes sense, I don't think they need to be such of a night/day difference in difficulty. I'd prefer if they'd make the story missions a bit easier, the job posting missions a bit harder, or some combination of the two.

One suggestion would be to provide a wider range of job board missions available. Instead of jobs that vary in a small range like 6 to 9, I'd much prefer a much wider range like 3 to 12. Give very small compensation for the 3 mission, and a huge payback on the 12 mission. This way, if you are hurting for money and equipment, you could take some very simple missions to earn a tiny bit of money for your battery'n'bot fund. But someone who is in good shape, and wants a bigger challenge could aim for a much harder mission. It would also be nice if there were other kinds of missions to play (Guard transports, deliver an item to another location, retrieve an item from a far-off base, search for a missing vessel, etc).