Engagements are good. Guaranteed scrap as long as you know how to fight. Random chance events which might cost you a crew member or hull damage are sketchy (“Giant alien spiders, eh? Sounds like a YOU problem”). There are too many of these in a run for it to be worth rolling the dice every time. In the long run, the house always wins.

You NEED to collect scrap to upgrade your ship and to have any chance later on in the game. Think about scrap the way Chess players think about Material. Your crew, weapons, and systems are material. Hull repairs, spent missiles, dead crew / drones cost you material. The key is mitigating risk. Improve shields and evasion as soon as possible, so you can take fights “safely.” In practice, I end up skipping the first few stores. They either come too early, or don’t have any practical weapons. Buy fuel, missiles, and hull as necessary (in the early game, I am usually only buying hull, and if I am lucky, exotic crew or a convenient weapon). I usually only repair my hull to 25/30, because there are several events which will give you free repairs, and you miss these free repairs if you are at 30/30. I also try to avoid using missiles in any encounter where I have the upper hand (because they ultimately cost scrap). If I am taking damage, or the adversary is about to jump away with MY scrap, I will use missiles to stop it, but otherwise I treat it as a panic button.

You can upgrade your reactor, shields, and weapon capacity any time you are safe (e.g. after an encounter, before jumping). These are some of the most important early upgrades, and you don’t need to be at a store to do them. Priority one is upgrading shields and engines (evasion). You do not need to have enough reactor to power everything. You can remove power from med, (or even oxygen, until your enemy is crippled) to keep your shields / engines / weapons running. If an enemy fires a missile at you, you can pause, remove power from shields, and put it all into engines in that split second to maximize your dodge chance (which is small until upgraded). If they shoot ion weapons at you, you can also turn off your shields for a second to expose other systems, so hopefully the ion hits your doors or scanners instead of being a guaranteed hit on your shields. It is faster to turn the shields off and on then to wait for even a level 1 ion hit cooldown.

You need two upgrades to upgrade certain systems. For example, shields require two upgrades to get a second layer, but by doing one upgrade, that means the system can take one damage without going offline (and this requires no extra power). It might not be immediately obvious, but a lot of times it is worth doing these “buffer” upgrades as soon as you can. Along the same lines, if you are playing the default ship, the “Kestrel A,” you can change the order of the weapons. If you put the pulse laser in the first slot, it will continue to function when your weapons system takes one damage, while if you leave it in the default order it will be taken offline, leaving you only missiles. If you put one upgrade into weapons, even if you haven’t found any new weapons yet, it will be able to take a hit and keep both your missiles and pulse laser online.

Focus all firepower on enemy weapons / drone control (prioritized based on which is the greater threat). Remove their ability to hurt you before attacking anything else. You might think you need to take out their shields first, but if you have a pulse laser which shoots three projectiles, you can damage enemies as long as they don’t have three shield layers. Once their weapons are down, you might think it is time to hit their shields, but no. Hit their cockpit. Once their cockpit is down, they have a 0% dodge chance. Then, you can think about targeting shields, but oxygen might still be a better choice (but it is likely they will have weapons back online before you get here). There is a crew inside that ship scrambling to fix shit and put out fires, just like yours. Keep them busy. Also consider their race. Engi do repairs extra fast. Mantis do repairs much more slowly. It is possible to crew-kill a Mantis ship from oxygen deprivation with a couple well-timed hits.

Pilot and Engines are the most important systems to crew, because without them you have zero dodge chance. If you play a ship like “Torus A” (the first unlock), you will have a crew of two Engi and one Human. In cases like this, it makes sense to assign the human to weapons. They are the strongest crew member in terms of combat, and will be able to deal with boarding parties while the weaker crew keeps the essential systems functioning. You don’t want to take your pilot off duty to fight boarders if you can help it.

Try to hit as many stops as possible in a sector, because the difficulty will only increase in the next. If you end up in a situation where an enemy is incapable of penetrating your shields, farm experience for your pilot / engine / shield operator. I think it is even possible to farm experience for your weapons if the enemy has one shield but cannot hurt you, by immediately removing power after the first laser projectile is fired, but I haven’t managed to do this effectively yet.