Great game! However, I would suggest changing the behaviour of the moons.
Right now the moons are such a big threat that the best way to win is to simply devote all resources to avoiding them, and hope the enemy collides with them before you do (as all the top bots in the ladder clearly demonstrate). This not a very fun strategy and makes for quite boring matches.
One way to avoid this problem is to make the moons harmless. They still pull you in and push you around, but when you collide with them nothing happens. Thus they would no longer be the biggest threat on the field, but rather a nonfatal annoyance. The biggest threat on the field would instead be your enemy, and to increase your chances of winning you have no choice but to actively try to kill him.
The moons will still have to be dealt with accordingly by the ships if they want to be effective, but a majority of the resources will now go towards battling enemy ships. Much more fun to code and to watch.
Not really true. A quick hack that does two things (evade moons and kill queen) provides already some interesting chaos. Look at my Ripoffs (only 1 match in ladder right now, but wins with the #6 pretty consistently). As people develop some better bots, evading moons will be less and less noticeable part of their behavior. Especially if some of those will be open sourced too.
I think the moons are okay. The very early algorithms we're seeing are primitive -- they try to avoid moons by thrusting directly away from them, which is a bad idea. When people introduce proper route planning, moons will look less overpowered.
Right now the moons are such a big threat that the best way to win is to simply devote all resources to avoiding them, and hope the enemy collides with them before you do (as all the top bots in the ladder clearly demonstrate). This not a very fun strategy and makes for quite boring matches.
One way to avoid this problem is to make the moons harmless. They still pull you in and push you around, but when you collide with them nothing happens. Thus they would no longer be the biggest threat on the field, but rather a nonfatal annoyance. The biggest threat on the field would instead be your enemy, and to increase your chances of winning you have no choice but to actively try to kill him.
The moons will still have to be dealt with accordingly by the ships if they want to be effective, but a majority of the resources will now go towards battling enemy ships. Much more fun to code and to watch.