I've seen a lot of people complaining about the difficulty of early game. I think the issue isn't the mechanical difficulty of the game but rather the bad risk/reward factor of combat. The problem isn't just in the early game but it is most pronounced there. Losses are so much more punishing than wins are rewarding. Even losing a single ship is enough to negate any benefits of a winning a bounty in the early game and even in the late game, losing a cruiser is almost never worth it. I personally really like fighting battles that are difficult but I end up only fighting battles where I know I won't take damage because that is the only way to make progress in the game. I want to fight big fleet battles vs very difficult opponents and take loses in a hard fought victory but that is not incentivized at all in the game. A couple ideas I had for trying to fix this:
Rework the bounty system, add some sort of proper salary function, add some sort of story driven element that gives the player some reason to fight other than money, give the player the means to make ships and weapons cheaply (I'm sure some of these have been suggested before, but maybe one of them is original).
The bounty system:
I think the current bounty system would work better as a 'most wanted' bounty system with very high difficulty and much higher rewards. I think that adding another more local bounty system could be very helpful. I imagine having the bounty fleets flying around like normal fleets and the player having to scan them to determine that they that there is a bounty on them. They could also be much more numerous to give the player a more consistent form of income, without massive travel expenses in fuel. You could also have many different levels of difficulty present at once so that the player has the option to take on big fleets for big rewards or crush small fleets for small rewards (I really don't like how the current bounty system has tiers and you only have a certain tier available at any time). I think that this bounty system should only be available through faction commissions, i.e. the hegemony has bounties on it's enemies, perhaps with some rng variance on how much they are worth so that you have to find the ones that are worth fighting (or you could just have a random chance for any enemy fleet to have a bounty). You could also add a bounty hunters guild for early game or if you don't want to side with a faction. Currently the bounty system is the only effective reward system in the game so I think it needs some improvement. Even just increasing the size of the rewards would go a long way.
Salary Functions: what is sounds like, a faction gives you a monthly salary. This would help because it decouples your income from combat so that losing some combat is not so directly losing your money/income. It would probably be a good idea to have some requirements for the salary, i.e. the hegemony pays you to keep a certain system clear of pirates and if too many are there, you lose your job. This could also make some more interesting encounters where you have to kill some big pirate fleet or risk losing your salary. This in combination with faction bounties could make income far more consistent.
Story Elements: This feels like the least likely to be implemented, at least in the short term. I think it could be done in small parts though, like more interesting/involved single missions (a man approaches you and offers you money to help him establish a base on a far out planet, you have to fight your way in). You could have small story arcs from this where the same person gives you progressively more challenging and rewarding missions. Could also be tied into gaining access to faction commissions. This would probably require some scripted evens though, which doesn't seem like the direction the game is headed.
Means to make ships and weapons: This seems like the direction the game is headed in. If you could make certain ships and weapons very cheaply, it wouldn't be a big deal to lose them, and you would only have to worry about your more exotic ships and weapons. I'm definitely very excited to see what the industry skills bring into the game.
I would like to say that everything above is about making combat more rewarding and that adding other ways of making money into the game like trading and scavenging would achieve a similar goal, but I think that most people really love the combat in this game and making it more rewarding would go a long way towards making the game more fun to play.
