I notice that the movement 'sphere' between turns is perfectly circular; i.e. the flagship can spin around and cover as much distance going backward as if it continued forward. That may be normal for shmups, but this game is no longer a shmup, and I think it would be worthwhile to make ship movement more restrictive with regards to changing the ship's trajectory. I'm not a tester though, so I don't know how easy or difficult it is to dodge shots in the game right now.
The main thing is how long turns are, and that thus makes it so that you really can't predict well exactly the turning arc that your ship would have. I tried it with a slower turning arc for the flagship in this model, and it just felt terrible. You also can't really effectively move between lines of enemy shots, which is really a key thing to do.
Ok, before I even mention anything else.....
Experimenting with abilities, and these are turning out to be a major balance problem.
I know, I've been stewing over that for a few days. I figured out a solution last night, though.
I think that with the changes I have in mind for abilities, this will be the final thing that really makes the combat shine. Stay tuned, I should have it before Monday.
The good thing is, that other than this, there's not that many issues with the combat now. The combat system is alot of fun, and it's pretty deep as well. Plenty of challenge to be had as well. Turned out to be a really great idea overall.
Awesome! Really glad to hear that from you, since I know you loved the old model too.
EDIT: Also I'm really glad you made those changes to all the bullets and such.... it's all muuuuuuuch easier on the eyes now. Much less eye-strain and generally just good-looking too.
It was your idea -- I was really skeptical at first, but I really do like it. It fits with having fewer bullets that do more damage, too. That also will help performance enormously with low-end machines (Cinth's laptop has suffered in the past, while his desktop flies). The number of shots out during a battle is something like a third what it used to be, if that. But that makes each shot more meaningful, and actually so you can dodge, etc, etc. So the larger size made a lot more sense there.
Possibly... but most turn-based games are frankly just as stop-start as this, in my opinion. Either that or they just have excessively long animations (FFT I am looking at you, even though I love you).
Off topic.
If you didn't play a summoner, the animation length wasn't bad. I think it's about time to kick off another round of FFT (how to fit it in though?). 
In FFTA, the Elementalists were the worst, in my opinion. But Solar Prominence and so forth were just SO useful. But just watching your guy slowly walk over, hit the enemy melee, damage pops up, you set your turning direction, camera slides over to the next guy, repeat... whew, I hate how long all that takes. Granted, it hasn't stopped me from putting like 100 hours into that series, but still.
While this might be the desired behavior in some cases (e.g. I want to quickly dodge these bullets and then stop to do some damage from a good position), in other cases it might be better to adjust the ship's speed so that it is moving for the whole turn with a constant speed, so to speak.
It's something that would be easy to code, and we could certainly make GUI buttons for the modes. I'm kind of skittish of making too many specialized modes, though, to be honest. The more decisions a player has to make, the longer things tend to take -- whereas if you have a simple set of rules, then the player must play within those rules. IE, in Chess you only get one move, you can't opt to "save" a move and use it later, or just skip moving anything. So that cuts out a certain kind of complexity in Chess that would be just overwhelming. If you could save moves and use them in pairs, you could set up forks and skewers with ease, for instance.
Not to say that this is on the same level as that sort of addition to Chess, but my goal is to keep things fluid, and the more things players have to consider at once, the less fluid it gets. So there's just kind of a sweet spot that I'm aiming for between being overwhelming and being simplistic. It's kind of a judgement call, the closer you get to that line, and right now I'm not really aware of situations where the alternate movement mode would be so useful that it would be worth adding.
Keep up the good work, it is shaping up nicely and I am really looking forward to lay my hands on the final game (or a public beta or whatever).
Thank you very much!
