I played the Sega Genesis game with duels and you actually used all the abilities of every ship in the various matchups. In this game, 90% of the ships are worse than your flagship, like so much worse it isn't even fun to experiment with them.
I loved the melee mode in the original Star Control for the combat, and I love Star Control 2 for the exploration and the story.
I typically enjoy using all of the mushroom guys, the spathi, the one really advanced race that's not the ur quan, the ur quan and the pkunk? But even those, most of them yeah just aren't very good.