Potential Spoilers below, be warned.
1: The AI for the scenarios involving Starbase attack and defense needs work. The NPCs seem to be on FRD, simply engaging whatever the heck seems good. Since the player engaging the Starbases one-on-one isn't exactly a great idea (Though Bomber Drones make for great fodder when trying to get a few final shots in), he/she has to wait for the NPCs to make a move towards one before it is feasible to attack it. The problem is then that the player is mindlessly killing enemy NPCs as fast as he can to get his own friendly NPCs to set their next target to be a starbase. I spend a whole hour doing this in the Shattered Pillar Vs. Dark Spire + Anoids 1v2 match, and got from level 1 all the way up to level 14 in a single challenge. The whole time just swatting down NPCs in hopes that I could swat all of them down fast enough for the Shattered Pillar NPCs to take a starbase as a target.
Perhaps instead of FRD'ing the military units, perhaps give them attack-move orders to the various starbases? This way they'll still defend themselves and shoot down incoming enemies, but won't be so clueless as to get within striking distance of a starbase just to turn around and go to another one to fight a single ship. Either that, or perhaps a radar dampening champion hull to allow the player to feasibly directly attack the starbase? I've used the Human and Zenith models, and have unlocked the Nenzui but haven't used it yet. If Radar dampening is added onto one of the champion hulls, he can engage the starbases, but isn't completely invulnerable because the base will spawn NPCs which will close range, forcing him/her to fight them.
2: The Tackle Drone launchers are quite cool, except that they can take ships WAY too far out of the planet. They have taken my ships nearly twice the distance they shouldbe able to go out of the system's radius (WAY past the 2 yellow circles), and it makes finding and regrouping them terrifically impossible. Perhaps have the drones not fly so far out, or stop once they hit the ddge of the system? Anything to prevent me having a play area nearly 3-4x the size of the planet, as finding units and selecting them to give orders becomes very cumbersome at this point.
3: I play on the "blitz" combat style exclusively--Are the champion and challenge NPCs supposed to scale with this? The challenge movement speeds are breathtakingly slow. It's not a huge detriment as I can speed the game speed up by +2-3 and somewhat mitigate it, but it would be nice for them to get a very slight speed boost. Or perhaps have different hulls have different attributes (IE: Zenith somewhat slower bu theavier armor, Nenzui faster but slightly thinner armor, etc.) just to give players an opytion on how they want to play in the challenge systems.
Other than that, I'm really liking this. I just saw the Abilities released so am about to boot up and try those out (With my Level 19 Champ, 14 levels of which came from my first challenge).