Thanks for the input. I should have looked for more input whilst making the game as I could have avoided some of the problems maybe. It's why I'm keen to help with Board Horde as I realise how valuable input can be. The thing that's most frustrating about the Kongregate crowd is they just say 'Loads of bugs', give it a 1 rating and then don't answer when you ask what the bugs are.
I sort of agree with you about the combat. Once you get good at it, it's actually much better to fly away from the enemies and have them chase you, which forces them to fly straight at you and they become easier targets. The 'fun' part of that is that you have to keep rotating to keep your stronger shields facing them (gives a Star-Trekky sort of feeling of 'starboard shields failing'). But overall I'd agree that the combat isn't quite right and let's the game down a bit. Worse of all, it's the bit that people see first and they just assume it's a combat game and could easily lose interest. The problem is, due to the movement style of the game (i.e from above and free to go in any direction) I'm not sure how to alter it. In a standard shoot-em-up, you're going in one direction so the enemies can be given paths and stuff.
By the way, interestingly, the ships have no AI at all. It's a strange quirk of the movement system that they constantly appear to dodging and weaving around, but it's just because of the way they move. Sometimes they even seem to retreat when they're damaged and come flying in for hit-n-run attacks but it's not programmed that way. They're just given a random location close to your ship and they attempt to reach it constantly, and occasionally change the location. All of their behaviour stems from that. I was expecting to have to work for weeks on the AI and it all worked with like 1 command xD
I did notice that it doesn't work on IE9. Not at all on my PC, it just loads up and freezes. Not sure how to fix that. It's dead on Kongregate now - 2 star rating, although if I knew what all the bugs were I'd fix them, delete it and re-launch it there because Kongregate DOES send you lots of traffic (about 300 hits in 2 days).
Incidentally, host your games on Clay.io. I'm not sure if the advertising revenues are broke but I made $2 from 300 plays, so almost 1 cent per play. That's huge in my experience.
I'll tweak the other stuff you mentioned. You can't actually save the game until you're in the station by the way. With the new C2 feature, I could probably change that to save the entire game now, even out in space.
Rosareven, give me a shout if you need any help with your game. It might be something I could help with if you're making something similar. I should say that C2 was fine for this game and I didn't experience any major obstacles, other than the ones everybody else probably experience (my pet-hate with C2 is the inability to tweak and object after it's created until your next top-level event, that caused me loads of problems).