How does the difficulty alter the game?

[Nanaki]

Originally Posted by Killer

I have just started my fourth playthrough and chosed hard. So far the biggest difference is XP. It seems really hard to get XP from killing NPC. I just spent all my points to antimissile defense for me and Ternie, ten killed about 40 pirates and I am at 3.8 XP points... Bye, bye 5th generation fighters

You can fix that, you know.

I play hard, do we have hardest difficulty?

Hmm, that is the hardest difficulty. Maybe it is just that active ECM is a lot better than passive ECM...