Are you supposed to easily lose missions even early on? I lost my main ship on a side mission in turn 4 and said fuck it and warped my remaining ship out since there's no way I can win a 2v1 when I lose the 2v2....
I also lost the first data recovery mission. After the worlds slowest 3 minute cat and mouse game I finally get the data and he just steals it right back. At this point I'm like "....wait a minute...what?". So I realize that okay they can steal those back, fine. I can steal it again with my other ship before he warps out, I wi- "data stolen". WTF? Oh hey look a new chaos ship out of fucking nowhere comes in, steals the fucking data AGAIN and starts to warp out, and which point I've already lost because both my ships have the ability on cooldown for like 70 more seconds.
So yeah, is this game just supposed to punch you in the groin repeatedly pretty much right from the get go?
I also don't feel like the mechanics are very easy to understand. Like, how does range work? During the tutorial you get told to set engangement range to 3000 on a ship with 6000 meter weapons?
Edit - Oh yeah. I had a nova cannon or some such thing on my new big boy ship. Is that thing a one time use per mission? Used it once, and i never became usable again.
The game starts out pretty hard if you don't use the tactical vision (press space to get a time dilation effect)
Don't let your ships do everything by themselves because they aren't the brightest puppies around. On data recovery missions you have to make a beeline for the target ship, steal the data with a fast yet durable vessel and then start running. Once the timer for the warp drive runs out, click that and get out of there (that's the objective, both yours and the enemy's, and that's why the enemy ship escaped with your data) Another important bit of info on that kind of mission is that you can set a priority target for your guns (engines, deck, weapons, etc) and you should also set the target ship as priority 1 (there's 1 to 4) All those things can be done if you select the enemy vessel.
The game likes to punch you in the groin repeatedly, yes. Remember that you can lose missions, it will make your job harder in the future but it's not the end of the world.
Engagement range depends on your weapons and the kind of enemy you are battling. Macrocannons lose accuracy pretty fast (there's an upgrade that you can buy that helps a lot with that) so that's why the tutorial told you to reduce the engagement range.
The Nova Cannon is a superweapon that has a pretty long cooldown, so that's probably why you couldn't use it again. Remember that the enemy can destroy your weapons, so that's another thing that could have happened there (you can do the same thing to them, just set weapons as a priority target in the enemy ships when you select them)
When I started playing the game I thought that it was incredibly unfair (I got an escort mission that seemed impossible until I realized that I could use one of the transports as bait and run for it with the others) It's actually pretty fair, you just have to get a feel for the enemy that you are fighting against. For instance, Ork ships will always try to ram you, Eldar will engage and then run away, Chaos are a mix of both, etc.
Don't forget to use torpedoes, they can get you out of tight spots.