This game takes time.
Every system has so much depth, even despite a thousand hours of experience i still see myself improving every time i start a new project.

As an example of this complexity, i will talk a bit about armor. At the start of the campaign most enemies are made mainly of wood, however the most common building block is metal. Metal is nice: it has good armor level and health, doesn't quite float but comes close enough that floating wont be too big a problem, and is not very expensive.
However, if you build your ship out of metal, you die to EMP. In order to avoid this, you must isolate electrical components with a layer of wood, stone or rubber, or add large amounts of surge protection.
Now your creation will survive EMP, but theres other stuff we must concern ourselves with: HEAT and HESH.
HEAT in this case is not heat, but rather High Explosive Anti-Tank munitions. HEAT and HESH both "ignore" your armor, releasing destructive fragments inside your ship when they hit. The way to block these weapons is to add air gaps inside your armour, causing them to release these fragments in those pockets, or to add a layer of ERA (Explosive Reactive Armour) wich will detonate to destroy the fragments.
The fragments spawned by HESH are made of whatever armour they came out of, so in order to reduce the damage you take you need to make your inner armour out of weaker materials such as wood.
All of these air pockets and extra layers require more volume and materials, so you end up weaker against simpler weaponry, such as explosives, fragmentation and kinetic shells, and for smaller builds protecting against everything is impossible.

I often pit my designs against a friend of mine who relies on high firerate HESH cannons, so i've had to learn how to avoid leaving any pathway the shockwave can take to my internals.
on a side note, my go-to weapon type is Armor Piercing High Explosive, with delivery via hybrid railgun for medium doses or CRAM mortar for nuclear level.

TLDR:
If my review is too big for you, so is this game.

This game takes time. Every system has so much depth, even despite a thousand hours of experience i still see myself improving every time i start a new project. As an example of this complexity, i will talk a bit about armor. At the start of the campaign most enemies are made mainly of wood, however the most common building block is metal. Metal is nice: it has good armor level and health, doesn't quite float but comes close enough that floating wont be too big a problem, and is not very expensive. However, if you build your ship out of metal, you die to EMP. In order to avoid this, you must isolate electrical components with a layer of wood, stone or rubber, or add large amounts of surge protection. Now your creation will survive EMP, but theres other stuff we must concern ourselves with: HEAT and HESH. HEAT in this case is not heat, but rather High Explosive Anti-Tank munitions. HEAT and HESH both "ignore" your armor, releasing destructive fragments inside your ship when they hit. The way to block these weapons is to add air gaps inside your armour, causing them to release these fragments in those pockets, or to add a layer of ERA (Explosive Reactive Armour) wich will detonate to destroy the fragments. The fragments spawned by HESH are made of whatever armour they came out of, so in order to reduce the damage you take you need to make your inner armour out of weaker materials such as wood. All of these air pockets and extra layers require more volume and materials, so you end up weaker against simpler weaponry, such as explosives, fragmentation and kinetic shells, and for smaller builds protecting against everything is impossible. I often pit my designs against a friend of mine who relies on high firerate HESH cannons, so i've had to learn how to avoid leaving any pathway the shockwave can take to my internals. on a side note, my go-to weapon type is Armor Piercing High Explosive, with delivery via hybrid railgun for medium doses or CRAM mortar for nuclear level. TLDR: If my review is too big for you, so is this game.