Let me preface this post with some information: i have not played a game yet, only read through the rulebook. maybe some of my gripes will be gone once someone with game experience shares his knowledge with me. Also so far i actually enjoy the starfinder rules for the most part, and understand that going with a one-book release meant cut corners. Also the words "player preference" has no place in this discussion. this is all about rules and numbers, not what players enjoy. this is a balancing discussion.
Major gripes: these problems as some that i would consider the worst, or game-disbalancing
-EAC VS KAC: now i enjoy the two different AC's, reminds me of mass effect 1, but from even a rapid glance, most armors seems to give more KAC than EAC for the majority of them, and most energy weapons deal as much or more damage than kinetic ones, with no seemingly major downsides, so why would i pick kinetic weapons over energy?
-lack of shields: several artwork depict shields, either material or energy, and since melee still plays a large part of combat, why are there no shields? shields could even help balance the EAC VS KAC issue
Minor gripes: mostly unimportant or small issues that wont affect the game much.
-most classes share the whole class choice system of choosing different abilities every other level, but instead of giving those a blanket term like "perks" or whatever each class has a name for it. just a tad annoying, nothing major. i know they are officialy called "class choices" but theyre not refered to that in the actual class descriptions.
-powered armors: they feel like a last minute after-thought. once again probably a result of the "one book" feature, but theres only like 5 power armors and the options for each are slim,
-lack of solarian armor crystals: self-explanatory, no further input needed.
-cybernetics, or "augments": same issue as the powered armors, the options feel slim a bit, especially when you consider the leveled aspect of it all. a variety of more "fluff" augments would be nice.
-spaceships: now this is probably the most minor of all problems, easily overlookable, but for me its hilariously off-mark. the scope of ships is entirely screwed, to put it lightly. the kasathas came on a huge colony vessel, one of the biggest ever seen, that was suposed to bring enough of them to populate a huge world...its 5km long. thats literaly nothing. i served in the navy and the amount of space on a ship dedicated to nothing but various systems is huge, and now this one also needs farms and stuff on it, which means livable space must of been next to nothing, and it must of brought with it less than 10 thousand people, which is not a lot. also in the ship scale table, the largest ship is said to be 15K feet long for "colossal", and weighs.... 8K tons. the real life uss nimitz is 1000 feet long and weighs over 100K tons. these wonky sizes and weights actually made me laugh loudly upon reading them, but as stated earlier, are not game-breaking in any way, just amusing. to add to this point, absalon station follows the same problem. its 5 miles in diameter. considering that of all that space, at least a third of that is lost to various machinery and systems to keep a space city going, its got to be rather small overall, not at all the multicultural regroupment point of space its painted to be.
Final words: now of course most of these problems will likely be resolved in the future when expansion books will come out, adding more features or fixing existing ones. In some aspects, such as powered armors, i would of prefered not having them at all, and getting a nice, meaty book filled with a variety of them and upgrades later on.
