[Kazeto]

I don't know about ships for sale as it is, but doing racial quests (the ones you get from embassies) for a single race 0enough times will give you that race's ship. The easiest is probably the bankers' quest, you just need to thrown a few millions of credits at them.


Now moving onto the next thing, oxygen. I don't know what your oxygen capacity is, but I stopped having this problem once I got over 100 of it (any of the “walker” items—mountain walkers, water walkers, hazmat suits, or thermal isolators, depending on the planet—also help) which is something you can have by mid-teen sectors, really. The game tracks absolute distance to where you are from the pod rather than real distance as required due to the terrain being a maze, so some planets are really risky until then.

I've seen the auto-explore weird out and continue to explore for a bit longer, though, so it is a possibility that it did that in your case. But I have no idea what triggers this, and it did stop before I got across the point of no return, so I can't say if it's the same thing.


With gashers and the lack of a multi-target weapon, I don't know if you dislike crafting or simply are not aware it exists, but even without any officers that have crafting-enhancing skills, you can make items that aren't all that bad. So you can just go to an earlier sector, buy every item that is cheap enough, dismantle it, repeat with station from the next or previous sector, and after not too long you will be able to craft your own weapons. And those fairly often are multi-target.


Officer training ... once you get good at making your away team people survive, it's easy enough to get a lot of experience by sending all of your officers on away missions. The only issue is oxygen because with all 6 officers on away team you will have ridiculous amounts of health compared to the damage dealt by monsters. Add a scientist with that skill that constantly heals damage and you'll be a juggernaut (I had been walking on planets that dealt environment damage to me, and my health actually regenerated instead of being lost over time).


The one about other ships doing nothing while pirates shoot away at you, I honestly have no idea but I suspect it has to do with how race relationships work. I've actually seen other races attack each other more often than I get attacked (though, considering I have a set of weapons that can destroy anything that looks wrong at me from half a sector away, I don't blame them for not trying) and usually stuff like that evolves into a sector-based war between the two nations involved while the rest of the nations chill out, spare the really rare situations where a third race joins too (why, I have no idea).


Outside of those few, I more or less (with some more, with some less) agree with what you wrote, so I'll end there.