This game is hilariously unbalanced. Early-on you may land on a bunch of enemies on your first planet and have zero chance to survive and even struggle after a few upgrades, but most upgrades stack multiplicatively with others, making your power quickly go completely out of control.
Here's a little guide for 1.01:
The first planet you deploy on must be grass or water. You can still get instantly flattened if you land on those, but you have a good chance of survival. I'd actually recommend water over grass, because you get orders of magnitude more resources there, although grass is good for beginners because enemies don't respawn.
Whenever you move or take damage while charging, your charge pad gets disabled for a few seconds, if you are within its range when it gets enabled again, you snap back into place.
The "50% more credits" upgrade stacks multiplicatively with itself, while the level up cost only scales linearly. This means that if you collect 6 of those you actually get over 10 times more resources. With this you can get as many upgrades as you want, but BEWARE. You cannot eject with leftover upgrades, so if you overdo it, you have to spend ages picking random upgrades before you can leave a planet.
Some upgrades have some kind of undocumented caveat, consider these before you buy them:
- The invisibility upgrade increases your passive energy drain.
- The multishot upgrade increases energy used per click.
- the revive upgrade does not let you safely experience game over animations, sorry lol, but you can just watch them whenever you want, since they are plain MP4 files in the folder. Also I think there are some instakills in the game that eat your revives very fast.
Energy is paramount and your health drains in an instant when you are out of energy. Consider this before getting the auto repair upgrade. The health orb upgrade does not have such a downside, other than potential particle spam.
Get revive upgrades, trust me, but not early on.