New player here. I have recently completed most of the missions on all the difficulties so for a new challenge I wanted to see if I could place on the leaderboards for any of the survival missions. I succeeded on the order one and out of curiosity I looked at some of the other people that were listed and noticed that a number of them had fleets listed that were not apart of the main game. Were these modded in and if so are their capabilities not balanced like the other fleets? I’d be just a little miffed if someone could mod some overpowered fleet into the game and then get a really high score off of these particular missions. I apologize if this has already been discussed, it was just something bugging me.
This is a known problem. You can safely assume that all the highest scorers in the survival missions are modded. If that bothers you then avoid the survival missions.
If you want something new you may want to try some of the online challenges. If someone posts a modded challenge, you won’t be able to play it unless you have an identical mod. This protects you from mods in the challenges. Be warned though that many of these challenges are much more difficult than the built-in missions.
Unfortunately the high scores are almost entirely due to mods.
Its very easy to make a ship that is literally invincible. You only need to throw a couple zeros in. Make an armor module that gives a few thousand points of armor, repair modules have unlimited spare parts, or shields that have a reflection value of 80+.
You can then rack up any score you want in the survival missions.
What I figured. Oh well, I should feel pretty accomplished I managed to make it on the board at all with a vanilla fleet. Thanks for answering my question though.
but you can’t make it TOO good, because you have to lose in order to actually post your score. and the people who do this must have really high spec computers, because mine crashes when I get a score of 150000 or so (UNMODDED), causing it to crash without saving the high score 
um, cant you just admit defeat? i havent tried teh survival missions in a while but it seems to me that is an easy out.
yeah, but it won’t allow you to submit your score if you do.
Really? Modded? Okay now I don’t feel so bad at all.
I only got in the high scores with one of them and just couldn’t figure out how some of those people got such high points. I don’t do that badly in the challenges. There should be away to fix that - maybe allowing non-modded fleets.
Berny
impressive, i havent tried the survival missions much