A few suggestions...

[Chronosv2]

Firstly, that's pretty depressing to hear, but I really agree with you in some points.

It's something I've had all my life so I'm used to it, and find it perfectly normal. I still play games, even if they tend to be more visual in nature than a lot of other media. Heck, sometimes the added challenge of not being able to see all the screen details can be fun.

-snip- Say, a beep for the primary weapon being finished charging, two (of the same) beeps notifying of the secondary weapon, and so on..

That could work too. An audio cue would do wonders with weapon timing so I don't waste half my shots on raised shields like the AI does. XD

-snip- ...but I'm guessing that a row of blinking energy bars would be enough to get your attention and thus allow you to fix whatever is causing the problems.

Generally I see the symbol on the in-ship display turn orange/red, so I tend to not have any problems with that. My ship is where I tend to focus my vision, because should any fires break out or boarders sneak in that's where the action's at.

Lastly, seriously abuse your spacebar

Oh I do. A lot. It helps me keep up with the many things that can go on in any given time, but using it to gauge weapon charge and timing attacks would be a tedious endeavor.

[darthkiwi]

I have two suggestions. These aren't particularly well thought-out, just what's occured to me while playing.

1) Some way of overloading/supercharging systems. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but perhaps you could sink two energy points into a system to force it up (temporarily) to the next level. This might also cause damage to that system. I like the fact you can take some systems offline to feed power to other systems - it gives players more freedom and it feels like you're stretching your ship to the limit - but providing them with this sort of option would allow them to stretch it even further.

2) A much bigger idea: a new singleplayer mode set in a persistent world. Basically a career mode; you would gain resources by attacking ships, helping people in need, perhaps taking on missions, and would eventually buy bigger and bigger ships with larger and larger crews.

Without the threat of the advancing rebels, you would be free to explore a number of galaxies, which would be spread out more evenly than they are now - more like Mass Effect's galaxy map than the current semi-linear one. It might make sense to have several factions fighting each other - to give the players a reliable source of combat - and if so, players might be able to capture whole star systems for their faction once their ship is powerful enough.

This would be a lot of work, obviously, and it's not my time I'm pledging here. But I think this kind of game mode would extend the game in a really interesting way, even though it's pretty much the exact opposite of its current roguelike stance.