Yep, that the biggest drawback of the game, even with low difficulty settings. I know piratez is designed to be a real challenge, but sometimes it's very frustrating! That is because i think there are too much armored and well armored enemies since the very beginnings. I think those may appear more proportionately, less in the beginning, more in the advanced game time. Hell since factions ships are raided they should take some countermeasures!
Actually, the supply crafts that I am raiding are from the Church of Sirius, so they are crewed by neophytes and zealots. Neither of those are hard to kill once you spot them. The problem is that those guys are armed with rpgs with baby nukes, and gauss weaponry, so if they find you, they are well able to kill you too.
I used to have problems with armored enemies, but if you pack explosives and flamers early on, then heavy flamers, heavy machine guns or rpgs, the personal armor dudes are fine. The powered armor ones are more tricky, but they can usually be isolated. The only problem I've had was when a trader in gold armor spawned at the front of his task force, so I couldn't approach because all the other traders were covering him.
Now my main challenge is coming up with proper armor for the gals. Heavy armor is ok, but it decreases stats a lot, and juggernaut too (but that nicely makes you immune to a lot of "mainstream" weapons, making normal raids a LOT safer as you can easily tank the shots).
Piratez creates very interesting choices: what can you engage? What is worth the risk of engaging? What is worth the time investment to research? It is very different from vanilla where you can pretty much engage anything (unless you somehow get ethereals before lasers, maybe..). It creates an interesting progression:
1- You need better weapons to take out at least personal armors
2- You want some kind of armor to prevent the gals from dying
3- Concentrate on "easy" raids to get money and grow your first base
4- You need more radar coverage so create satellite bases/zeppelins
5- Your best gals are wasted in regular raids, and still run the risk of getting injured, you need better armor (but that's still too expensive/advanced, and you probably don't have many powered armor parts) or to grow the crew and get a "training base" specializing in taking out easy enemies (so 1-2 gals in tanky armor, or an actual tank, the rest with long range guns to pew-pew stuff).
6- more progression, crazier enemies, need to improve tech and it keeps going from 1.
EDIT: oh right, you modded it so your gals have stats like 1500+ TUs. No wonder something broke. With 110/110 psi stats, your max psi attack strength is like, 242, allows to easily MC tanks.
lol! You abuse the game? The game doesn't want to play anymore..