This has been massively improved over the years with the introduction of Exobiology. Just about any new player can get into a ship worth a few mil and be collecting hundreds of millions of credits within a few hours without the need to consult a spreadsheet.
You certainly can min-max far beyond that point as you mentioned with external tools, but the feeling of ships or mission types being inaccessible is pretty much gone.
As an aside, I’m currently working on a guide to solve many of the issues you’re describing. Right now, it’s for my personal squadron, but I plan to expand this to a public sister site eventually.
This has been massively improved over the years with the introduction of Exobiology. Just about any new player can get into a ship worth a few mil and be collecting hundreds of millions of credits within a few hours without the need to consult a spreadsheet.
You certainly can min-max far beyond that point as you mentioned with external tools, but the feeling of ships or mission types being inaccessible is pretty much gone.
As an aside, I’m currently working on a guide to solve many of the issues you’re describing. Right now, it’s for my personal squadron, but I plan to expand this to a public sister site eventually.
https://oa.omnigon.network/
I’m also working on a video series to introduce the game. This is part 1 of 3: https://youtu.be/c9xS9tcn4sk