The genius of the game is that it's really about deep strategy and tactical optimization, despite the appearance of random chance as a hugely deterministic factor. The more you play -- and it took me hundreds of failed runs through to grok this point -- the more you realize that chance has something to do with it, but not all that much. As in poker, you get the hands you're dealt -- but how you play them makes all the difference.
I recommend reading up on the prevailing FAQs for the game. They go into great detail about how to optimize your runs through the first few sectors to gather the resources and items you'll need to survive the last half. For the life of me, I've never been able to beat the boss at the end of the game. I've come close, but personal circumstances forced me to stop playing for awhile, so I never climbed all the way up the learning curve. Even still, it's remarkable how different a player I was at that point from what I was when I started.
(I still enjoyed "fucking-around" runs, where I just sort of let stuff happen and bounced around from adventure to adventure. But that's a very different style from the min-maxing one needs to do to win.)
I recommend reading up on the prevailing FAQs for the game. They go into great detail about how to optimize your runs through the first few sectors to gather the resources and items you'll need to survive the last half. For the life of me, I've never been able to beat the boss at the end of the game. I've come close, but personal circumstances forced me to stop playing for awhile, so I never climbed all the way up the learning curve. Even still, it's remarkable how different a player I was at that point from what I was when I started.
(I still enjoyed "fucking-around" runs, where I just sort of let stuff happen and bounced around from adventure to adventure. But that's a very different style from the min-maxing one needs to do to win.)