Player hull and shield levels bugged?

[Gilith]

No matter which race I select at the start, hull and shield levels are always the same (around 180K hull, 160K shields, depends on difficulty level).
Then after I save the game and reload, it drops down to about 80K/20K (again, no matter which race's ship I have).
With enemies having 400K shields or more, something is clearly wrong.
GOG version, 1.001

[Tridus]

I think that's normal. The first mission has very inflated values as part of the intro. The smaller values are the normal ones. Those can be raised by researching or stealing technologies. There is a bug that causes the values to change when you load a save instead of after the first mission. I assume that'll be fixed soon.

As to the scales, you do a lot more damage than most of the enemies and can have much faster shield regen (and more abilities). So the enemies having larger numbers works out alright in practice.

[pepboy]

I feel that if a player turns off the tutorials, it could also be nice not to have the extra shields on the first mission, but that's a pretty minor adjustment.

[Histidine]

Should the first mission bonus even exist? It breaks the WYSIWYG rule pretty hard.