Just saw your post over at somethingawful and gotta say...
Actually... what you were flying there *is* the "mystery ship" .... with better weapons.
Balancing stuff is hard :/
Did you try to whittle them down from a distance? With your weapons you should be able to destroy one of the cruisers per turn, and battleships should be gone within 3 Turns tops. And with 5 Movement points they can't really close in. Just checking if tactics might have helped.
Oops, you read the SA post? Haha, I tried to be nicer here where I knew you'd read it and left the venting for there.
Yeah, I probably should have stayed at range and tried to pick them off one by one, it's basically what I tell myself everytime I die to pirates. But once I tried to escape, failed and got thrown in the middle of 3 Bs and a few Cs, at single-digit HP, it was all over.
Let me ask you, though:
is there anything I can do to stop the pirates from coming after me? Beat the pirate leader in a duel? I remember once there was a guy asking for a small amount of cash at a station who said he could keep the pirates away, but I accidentally hit a key and turned him down.
Also I don't think the Seismograph does anything right now, and I'm pretty sure oxygen and jetpack fuel tanks are stacking. They weren't supposed to, right?
And to close, let me just say I've been playing the hell out of your game, I love it and can't wait for the next version!
edit: oh yeah, just remembered another bug:
once I get the portable teleporter, the screen stops showing my jetpack fuel, and it no longer refills when I pass by my ship. Once it runs out, I need to leave the planet I'm on and land back for it to refill.