The genius of it is that the best players in the world can get a 30 run win streak, so it's mostly about having a good strategy and playing well. On the other hand, you pretty much will need to know exactly how to beat the final boss, or spend several runs figuring it out...

So you are right, it's not noob friendly. On the other hand, it's one of the most sublimely balanced roguelikes.

For me I had a different problem. On the Easy difficulty I made it to the boss the 2nd time I played, and almost every playthrough after and I won about 90% of the time. However on "normal" difficulty it was several dozen playthroughs before I could get to the boss, and I was so under-upgraded that I had basically zero chance.

I think I have 1 win to my name on normal difficulty (not counting the crystal ship, which is clearly overpowered). I find the only way I can reliably do well on normal difficulty is to take a lot of early risks and then just restart if I don't get lucky.

I remember taking like 30-40 runs before I even beat FTL on normal mode. That's what makes roguelike games fun, that winning depends both on skill and luck, and every iteration of losing on final boss gives you insight on how to beat it.

Into the breach kind of lacked roguelike RNG to the extent that every run more or less felt the same, so I ended up unlocking everything I wanted to after 3 days of playing. You also had infinite amounts of time to decide on actions in intoTheBreach, so there was no sense of urgency and it ended up becoming super easy to beat.

Beating it on 1 try was a little disappointing for me. I had higher hopes for intoTheBreach

Roguelikes aren't to be played only a handful of times. They are suppose to be hard and that is their replay ability. If you could beat FTL in 3 or 4 turns it would have ruined the game.

It's been a few years, but my winning strategy was using the square ship which I think had a self repair function or similar and disabling the boss ship as much as possible through fires, teleporting people to disable specific guns and using ion weapons. So not going for a full direct firepower method.