YMMV / Galaxy on Fire

• Game-Breaker: Buying maps to the Pan and Suteo systems allows you to get organs and turrets at their lowest prices. On all difficulties except Harder Than Hard, you also get huge quantities of them. Fly them to the Deep Science station and you can sell them for high prices. With the markup on an individual item being at least 2000 credits, you can earn millions of credits by just trading along this route. These systems also buy Implants at at least a 3000 credit markup, allowing you to make those millions faster.
  • Once you gain access to the Loma black market in the DLCs, these systems become even more lucrative as you can reliably sell organs, turrets and implants at their highest possible prices there, provided you fight your way past the bribe demanding gatekeeper pirates.
• Goddamned Bats: The Stealth Fighters in the Supernova DLC. While not that difficult an opponent to fight, they seem to choose the most inconvenient moment to attack you and fire at everything in the area. This can cause you to fail some missions outright, mess up your factional IFF and turn otherwise simple hops into turning dogfight furballs. Since they use Stealth Hi/Bye you cannot dispatch them quickly. And if you are carrying volatile materials, you are in big trouble.
• Squick: Vossk organs are an expensive commodity that can be traded. Why? Apparently, some people like to eat them. Sometimes, even Vossk will give you a very lucrative mission to acquire them.
• That One Achievement:: A few of the medals are tough, grinding or both
  • To get the Advanced Geologist medal, you must mine every type of asteroid core possible. Core mining alone is a tough skill based endeavor possible only by using a prototype drill crafted from blueprint, and requiring a moderately high amount of cargo space. But to get this achievement you must mine a Void essence core. To get that, you must first craft the Khador drive, then head to void space and mine that asteroid core while being shot at. All other cores can be mined without the hassle of being attacked by building up reputation, but you cannot do this with the Voids. Have fun!
  • The Survivor gold medal requires you to dock at a station with only 5% of hull health remaining. Normally if your health is down to 5% you are a goner anyway. If you have equipped a shield, to help you survive at such a low health, it will regenerate when you are no longer taking fire, invalidating the low hull health condition you need. Equip a hull repair bot to also help you survive, and that will guarantee more hull recovery. You could go out with just your ship and ram asteroids, but miscalculate and get splattered.
  • The Ore Athelete medal requires you to mine 10 asteroids completely without aborting, or docking onto a station. It is essentially like mining 10 cores all consecutively. And since asteroid mining requires you to have sufficient cargo space, you must use one of the cargo transporter behemoths to get this.
  • The Marksman medal requires you to destroy 3 asteroids with one shot. Unlike the Asteroid Hazard medal which you can get by firing a Liberator guided missile and flying it into asteroids, this medal requires that the weapon be an unguided rocket. So you can't even use your nukes or sentry guns.
  • The Grave Riser medal requires you to kill 5 enemies while your emergency protection system is active. No small feat, since the emergency system is active only for 5 seconds and the bubble it generates to protect you hampers visibility.
  • The Jammer medal requires you to spoof 5 enemies with a single EMP bomb. In order to do that, you must somehow get those 5 enemies to bunch up really close and get within range of your EMP bomb. Enjoy!
  • The Destroyer Destroyer medal requires you to destroy 20 capital ships belonging to the Terran faction. The Nivellians and Mido don't operate destroyers and while the Vossk have destroyers, it isn't possible to destroy them, due to difficulties the developers faced with rendering the explosion of those ships. So, Terran destroyers it is. They are tough damage sponges with long range turrets that can vivisection you if you get too close. But worse off, you lose reputation with your own species including at the Deep Science facilities for doing this.
• That One Level: Some mandatory levels could cause multiple cases of Rage Quit
  • The first ever pirate fight with the Betty, especially on higher difficulties. Your ship is a very fast planetary shuttle with no armor to speak off, atrocious maneuverability, a laughable number of weapon slots and your weapons are pea shooters compared to what you are going up against. The pirate ships on the other hand are agile damage sponges with modified Tyrfing blasters that not only pack a big wallop with each hit, but also pack enuff Dakka to shred you fast. Although you have a wingman, he isn't of much help to you other than being a temporary damage sponge.
  • The first ever Valkyrie mission can turn into this. You are tasked with committing Grand Theft Prototype on a new Vossk ship and fly it back to Terran territory. Your ship is what it is - you can't put your favorite accessories such as shields, armor, boosters, thrusters, cloaks, Khador drive etc to give you an edge. And like a typical Vossk ship, it is well armored but not very maneuverable. Your weapons are only close range scatter guns so you can't pick off the bad guys at range to clear a path either.
  • The boss fight with Alice's Valkyrie station can become this if you didn't prep before coming. The station has multiple turrets that will end you if you got too close, her pirate minions are otherwise coming at you from all sides and all you have to fight them with is a prototype whose only feature is a built in wormhole drive. Which ain't exactly workin' right at that time. You have a very limited number of equipment slots and your ship is slightly worse than being Jack of All Stats combat wise. If you haven't equipped any long range weapons to deal with those turrets, expect multiple Game Overs.
  • Alice again in the Supernova DLC. This time you must capture Valkyrie station by docking on to it, hacking your way in and arresting her. Expect that you have a three minute time limit to somehow get past the horde of Void fighters in your way, dock on to the station and complete the hacking mini game while those Voids blast away at you. Let the three minutes expire and it's Game Over man!
  • Your very first supernova DLC mission could be this, You have to dock on to one freighter, take on passengers, fly to a different freighter, dock on and unload them, rinse, repeat. Sounds easy right? Except that intense Gamma radiation has you severely constrained for time and this also marks the debut appearance of the pesky stealth fighters that can ruin your day if you don't pay enough attention to them.
  • Supernova again. Transporting the volatile Toad Mutagen to Mkkt Bkkt, as well as transporting volatile red plasma from Vossk space to Mido space. You are operating a Nitro Express at that point and your route has you traversing through territories of factions hostile to each other. And both have good enough chances that you will stumble into a pirate attack while traversing it. You can't use your wormhole drive as volatile goods will explode when the drive is actuated. Enjoy!
• That One Sidequest: Want your very own space station where you can accumulate a ship collection and stock items to craft blueprints? You can buy one as DLC. Or you can try to get it for free. But attempting to do that gives you the following two quests
  • First you have to break the pirate siege on the station. We are talking about 50 or so of those Demonic Spiders, emerging from four outposts. Kill all pirates and destroy all outposts in one go, and the station unlocks. And no, you can't pick off one outpost, leave the system, dock, repair and try again, as every time you return, there will be four outposts spawning pirates. Going in without wingmen, a cloak, lots of energy cells and nukes is not recommended.
  • Once you unlock the station, it still isn't yours just yet. It behaves like a normal Tech Level 1 station. To acquire it outright, you must return with 30 million credits and 50 items of a Gargle Blaster called buskat. The credits part you could get by just buying credit packs at the game store but the buskat is extremely rare to get. Getting about 10 to 15 is a chore, and you need 50. You're going to be making a lot of futile visits to multiple stations.