It sounds like you might not be executing the fights properly. You should be expecting to win all the early fights quickly and decisively, so that each of them is profitable by itself. Hard to say what exactly you're doing wrong, but especially early on the key decision should be what you're targeting, and the key bit of manual execution is timing your shots (do not just use autofire).

At least in early fights you'd want to concentrate on the enemy shields or weapons. A typical way to do that with the starting Kestrel might be e.g. to fire a missile on the enemy shield generator (the missile bypasses the shields, takes the shield room to orange damage, and that takes their shields down completely). Then fire the burst laser at the shield room to take them out for a longer time. After that mainly use the burst laser on their weapon room (to keep from taking any damage), but switch back to targeting the shield room if they get it repaired back to orange.

(As for how quickly you go through, you should leave each level exactly one turn before you're caught by the enemy fleet. Taking longer than that is wasting an opportunity to pick up more resources, taking longer means you're ending up in fights that generate no resources.)

I started out in a similar spot. I this FTL has an awkward issue with getting stuck in a loop where you die too fast to learn to not die. (Dwarf Fortress, NetHack, and others seem to have the same issue, while other roguelikes like Dredmor don't.) As you hit stage 4+ repeatedly, you start to get a much better feel for the game.

Start on Easy if you haven't, it helps a lot with breaking that loop. It doesn't undermine the gameplay at all like it does in some games, it just helps stretch your money and fuel further. It'll even help you unlock new ships that might suit your playstyle better for harder difficulties.

And yes - the variety and replayability are strongly tied to unlocking multiple ships and progressing far enough to try out a variety of different builds. Stage one just doesn't vary that much if it's all you're seeing.

Are you playing on Easy, Normal, or Hard?

Once you have the basic metagame down (I believe around 30 hours of playtime), then getting to the final zone should be doable with the default ships.

Also, are you using space to pause the game when you need it? I had no clue that I could do that until 20 hours in, just before I almost deleted it all of my computer.

Explore as much as you can without the rebel fleet catching up to you.

Generally speaking, you actually want to pick as many fights as possible. The game implies that you're supposed to be a peaceful and heroic Star Trek style Federation and that's not what it actually rewards at all.

The ship upgrades that are always available are more important than stuff you can buy in shops, even though the shop items are more interesting. An extra dot in shields pays for itself in a hurry. You'll eventually need other stuff, and there are multiple load-outs that work, but lots of multi-hit weapons with low power requirements is the simplest winning setup.

Those are the common misconceptions. The game doesn't actually do a great job of communicating how to play it well.

Difficult to diagnose your play style, but the early battles are pretty easy to win. Sometimes, with a second layer of shields your opponent literally cannot damage you. You can still control the game while paused, so you can give orders and time your shots to all land at the same time and overwhelm opponent shields. I usually target their weapons first, since repairs are costly.

> I thought it might just be that I'm too casual

You can also lower the difficulty level while you master the game's mechanics. Some things to consider:

- Training your crew - Acquiring more crew - What parts to sell - What parts of the ship to upgrade first - How to get by with more equipment points than you have reactor points - When to run - How to choose sectors

FTL has some odd strategy bits to it, especially early game. Here's a grab bag of things:

Abuse the pause button. You can take your time to think and plan.

Engines are a good upgrade: they let you avoid damage, which let's you save money. Every shield you buy is multiplied by how string your engine is.

You should focus on defense over offense the first few levels. I nearly always have two shields as my first purchase, even if I have to turn off my O2 or medbay to run them.

Its OK to avoid shops until you have enough scrap/junk to sell to buy something. Top priorities are usually cloaking and damage here. You can usually win battles with a very small weapons edge if you have strong enough defense, but if you go too far eventually you will be unable to touch enemies.

There is a mod out there [0], which prevents the rebels from catching up, thus allowing you to explore every single star in each sector. This gives you huge boost of resources, so you can quickly upgrade the ship and buy any equipment from stores. This may make the game easier to learn and try various strategies.

[0] https://www.nexusmods.com/fasterthanlight/mods/6