After seeing folks play during the launch I think the base difficulty is, just slightly, too easy. Just to be clear the base game isn't supposed to be brutally punishing, that's what surge difficulties are for. That said I think there's a couple of things allowing first timers to progress a bit too far into the game without hitting much challenge:
1. Over abundance of Armor Repairs. These are a bit too easy to come by. So I'm trimming down the flow of these a small amount.2. Enemies early on are pretty low threat. This is somewhat intentional but it's pretty easy to avoid losing any health until you hit the large ship wave. So I'm making some of the early enemies a tiny bit more deadly. Reverted this one, I think the armor changes are enough.
I've got some other changes that I'm playing with but I want to continue testing them out a bit more before releasing them. These are just a few quick fixes to bring the difficulty more inline with what I intended.