Just finished the game with a highly optimated but still not flawless strategy. They difficulty is not too high; quite the opposite, it's too low sometimes so that you can get away too long with awful play and wrong strategic decisions. As a result the optimal strategy consists of not buying items except for XP boosts and the most useful armor shield, since the problem when commanding a well-balanced fleet lies not in beating the enemies, but just in leveling the right ships in the right zones at the right time. So there are some flaws in the game design, but nonetheless i give it 5/5 for the challenging experience.
Correctiong regarding BUG: numbers over 100 sometimes are just not displayed correctly, but work as intended (XP and damage). there is another problem where some sort of attacks make no damage (same attack makes 0 damage and then 87 in the next round). seems to be a bug related to armor.