I'm confused. Was this game somehow made without ever being played? There's functionally no way to get past the second wave, getting past the first wave requires random chance no matter what you do, the meta-progression takes multiple orders of magnitude more resources than you get from failing the first wave over and over, and basic stuff like the size of the screen negatively affects gameplay. This is... not done. This isn't even a beta test, this needs serious work.
As mentioned in the previous comments, higher game speed is designed to be more difficult, but I am still looking into this and validating idea of making it "pure time compression" and thus much more casual friendly. It's balance between progression speed (armory upgrades) and ability to actually save time as you get stronger. Any further feedback, especially on the latest version v1.0.22 is and will be much appreciated! https://michalkomar.itch.io/starvoxel/devlog/1127100/release-notes-v1022