Combat in Starfinder

[Nekrotanos]

I just finished up Incident at Absalom Station and started up Temple of the Twelve, and it made me wonder about the combat statistics of monsters. The Akatas at a CR 1 having a +8 to hit were able to connect almost every attack if they didn't full attack, and even if they did they had a 50/50 chance of hitting. The Void Zombies made this even worse since they could hit with their tongue every round and deal 2 strength damage to whoever they were hitting. I don't fully understand how this is supposed to be balanced around the pcs at these low levels, since the monsters just get these bonuses to hit, and will almost always hit because of it.
I also noticed a flaw in the ship combat that happened afterwards at the beginning of the Temple of the Twelve. Both gunners on the enemy ship have a +12 to hit against a ship with a 13 starting AC, which I believe goes up to 16(I'm not sure of this calculation, I totally forgot about it when we did the combat) if the pc's pilot has 3 ranks in piloting, which should be possible at that point. That means that the enemies there hit on a 4. The PCs can get to a max of +11 (+3 from bab, +4 from Dex which assumes they put everything into dex, +2 from computers and +2 if the captain motivates) if they were to completely specialize in Dex, and the captain only motivates the gunner. This means against the enemy's AC of 17, they hit on a 6. This isn't too bad, but why do the enemies just have such a huge plus to hit, and why does it expect the PCs to totally specialize in something in order for them to be on par with the monsters? It doesn't make any sense to me, so I'm hoping someone here can help me understand the way these pluses are working. Combat seems to be very weighted towards the enemies right now with how high their bonuses are, and how fast they scale.

Edit: Also, sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I didn't really know where to put it.

[Torbyne]

Obviously with this being a new game they want everyone to get *really* familiar with the character building rules and this is just subtle encouragement to do so.

[Malk_Content]

Remember a CR1 monster is meant to take on an entire party and be a significant threat to them. With every character being able to heal 50% of their health multiple times a day you are also expected to get hit more. The entire party in turn has to think about putting it down using teamwork. Harrying and Covering Fire are your friends for example.

[Kudaku]

I'm not gonna get into the monsters since I don't have the second book, but I'm almost entirely certain the gunner bonus is an error - it looks like they used the full pilot bonus rather than just the pilot ranks +dex for the math. It's possible they altered the starship gunnery rules late in development and they didn't catch the fix before the AP books went to the printer. If you take out the +3 for a trained class bonus and a +1 for maneuverability you're looking at a more reasonable +8.

[EC Gamer Guy]

You don't get the bonus +2 Computers. What you can get is the floating +1 to any 2 checks (or whatever that is.) And you have some very optimized gunners there. I think the Captain gets to motivate 1 gunner, not all.

One balancing factor in starship combat is that the PC's ship is typically higher tier than the enemy and our pilots tend to be better giving an advantage in the piloting phase. I'd estimate our pilot goes last about 2/3 of the time.

But yes, the NPCs have ridiculous to hit mods at lower level.