Thanks for the feedback!
I wanted to direct the player with their abilities at that exact moment: i.e. at the start, you don't have a weapon, so you would need to unlock one by researching them... But you can't build a research node, because you don't have necessary power... so you need to build power nodes, to extract power. Then you build the research node, which in turn unlocks the research menu... and one of the first things you can get is the lasers & missiles for you to use.
Maybe I should work on this flow, or at the very least, restict the research menu a bit more to hint players?