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Personally, I think you just need more practice in Melee.
That's always the easy answer, when people say a game's feeling artificially difficult.Why not just address the design issue? Surely adding a couple of new choices to the existing menu UI isn't that big of a deal; nor would be changing the behavior of the AI if X or Y flag is set. Voila, game's easier for people who don't want it to be all that hard. Anyhow, if I felt like playing it any more, I'd probably get the source set up to build and see if I could knock it out; it's probably not too bad.
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Remember that it isn't a pure action game; there's strategy involved, and this is very important if you play against other players (but still important against the AI). One important aspect of strategy is ship choice; there's a very elaborate rock-paper-scissors chain in terms of what ship work best against what other ships (though this differs against players and the AI, since the AI is rather stupid).
When you're playing the SP game, you don't get those choices, unless you know the game's static universe really well and just go for the stuff you need right away (kind of like how you could speed-run through Fallout). Bear in mind that we're talking newbies here, not people who've beaten SP so many times that they helped write the Wiki about it.Unlike Fallout, however, the difficulty ramp is not well designed; it doesn't gently immerse you in the title past that very first fight, which is so artificially easy (compared to anything else you'll do) that the first "real fight" is like, whoa, I've just lost all three ships and now I have to reload from my last save, which was, oh, about an hour ago, because it doesn't auto-save or prompt to save when entering a battle. For a modern gamer who's used to how games are designed now, it's almost unbearably frustrating.
I just plain don't have time to sit and play Super Melee until I can win that Earthling Cruiser vs. Spathi fight, if it's even winnable vs. the AI. I have a million other games to play, and one without a difficulty slider and that big of a difficulty curve just doesn't appeal any more

Anyhow, I know that a lot of you guys probably played it back in the day and it's hard to have an unbiased conversation about this title; I had fun playing Star Control 1 with friends back in the day but never played this one, and I don't recall it being anything like this hard vs. the AI. It's just a bummer that what looks like a really rich game is marred by something that's pretty easy to address without destroying the core at all; a difficulty setting hurts no one and broadens a game's appeal. Ah well
