The wolfen starts out with a shield that renders it virtually immune to kinetic weapons in the early game. This means some factions are entirely toothless (well....more toothless than usual in the case of the centauri) This also causes problems with reactor overloads in combat due to the high power consumption (https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=3630). There's two ways this might be fixable:

1. Rebalance the shield so that a stock wolfen can't just ignore enemies, dropping the power consumption as well to deal with the power use bug. Giving the shield a decent downside would also balance it, but this is a starting shield....it probably shouldn't have that sort of issue
2. Replace the shield on the Wolfen with a Class II deflector. This is a nice, competitive shield against low-level enemies, and will keep the player alive easily while neither overloading the reactor nor rendering them immune to entire factions. This is my preferred option: SOTP Part 1 is the first thing people are going to play, and a lot of people are going to go for the gunship. It should not have super-specialised shields.