i have managed to destroy admiral gorc's warship on easy, normal and hard levels. i used everspace finished release 1.0.6.32482 from gog. it took me about two weeks playing on and off. i had played the original beta releases quite a bit until i was tired of beating them. i decided to quit playing them until the finished release came out. i hoped it woud be more challenging. i found the finished product to be surprisingly different than the original betas. three ships, three difficulty levels, enhancements, glyphs, a new story line and a completely different sector seven experience. the game also takes a lot longer to play. in fact, the game does not appear to have an end. i lucked into being able to transfer the last beta ship i was playing with to the new release. i had quit playing around sector five in the beta. i downloaded the new release over the old beta game. the new release lets you keep the old ship and keep playing with it until you get to sector seven. (don't accept a reset to a new game). you can't play sector seven with the beta ship. you have to go back to the hangar and get a new ship, but you get to keep your credits and you get bonus credits about equal to what you already had. you also get to keep your perks and blueprints and you get to keep some of the resources you had. to me, this was great deal. i had all the blueprints i needed to beat the beta game. why not the finished game, also? my credits allowed me to almost top out the interceptor and gunship perks, too. i jumped into playing the hard game first and decided to use a gunship instead of the old reliable interceptor. something about 1300 hitpoints with the gunship appealed to me. the hard game started with a jump suppressor right off the bat. it didn't get any easier as the game progressed. jump suppressors all over the place. fortunately, i got a jump stabilizer blueprint about half way through the run without it the game would have been a lot tougher. i ended up destroying about a dozen or so corvettes and over a 1000 drones and okkar ships, many of them elites and bombers, before destroying gorc's warship. i followed the narrative, but was still surprised at what awaited in sector seven. there are three different scenarios for sector seven. one, you get on your first sector seven run where you meet your sister, kill seth nobu and talk to adam roslin. next, you get to retrieve and collect eight DNA fragments for adam roslin. finally, you get to meet admiral gorc and take his ship out. in total, i made six sector seven runs in the hard game. this was because i had to make five runs to collect DNA fragments. there were only 1-2 DNA fragments available in each hard run. the last DNA run is also when you get to meet the good admiral. you can make fewer total sector seven runs in the normal and easy games because more DNA fragments are available per run. there was an oddity in the easy run. i did not actually have to retrieve power cores to destroy the admiral's ship. for some reason, i decided to directly attack the admiral's ship in the beginning. i used two ARC9000 fireballs and his ship blewup. a fluke? i don't know. every game i've ever played has them. you can tell from the number of sector seven runs you need to get the admiral's ship that the game plays a lot longer than the beta game. after you get gorc's ship, the game still goes on as you try to get out of the DMZ. you may even meet gorc again. who know? everspace has met my expectations. it is a good game.
