I didn't back Star Command when it was on Kickstarter because I rarely back kickstarters, but I decided to give it a shot when it launched on the iPad a few weeks ago and see what kind of space game it was. This game has charm but a few issues that could easily be fixed. Okay, some issues are tougher to crack, especially the crew control, but I'll try to offer some insight on what is wrong with Star Command and what I would do with it.
For winning fights and completing missions, you get tokens. Red, blue and yellow tokens. You can use them to recruit people and to upgrade/build new rooms for your ship. This is pretty well explained and the upgrades are pretty straightforward. You also have rooms that need 'ammo' tokens to be used. Such as recharging your shields, firing big missiles and dodging incoming fire.
The problem is that these rooms wont produce ammo automatically (you need to manually start the process), wont collect ammo they made (you need to select the ammo) and will not tell you how much ammo you've got (you'll click the button and it will say 'YOU ARE AT MAX AMMO'). Why not have the ammo replenish automatically, be collected automatically and stop being made when you're at max capacity? Micro-managing is painful in Star Command and reducing it to the maximum would make a better experience.
There is a fair amount of flavor text in this game, but not much on the descriptive side. Rooms have no explanations at all, leaving you to wonder what their point is. You don't know what you get from staffing a room, more so with multiple people (which would be easy to fix by adding a description of what the room does, what it does if staffed and the effect of additional staff.) and even tho I've staffed all of my rooms, I don't know really why or what would happen if I hadn't.
It's the same thing for weapons, you get a minigame without any explanations, even the first time, and I'm still unsure of the timing of some of them. I really like the concept of minigames to fire at the enemy ship as it removes the need for randomness and allows it to be a little bit more skill based but sometimes I'm unsure of when I need to tap the screen and I can fail or win with a seemingly random chance.
I think that more things should be automatic in Star Command, because the game is hard to control with all these tiny character sprites that you can miss easily and tap on the room and vice-versa. I would add a list of all your crew somewhere on screen, with their current station and a little number of options (such as their behavior if something breaks/aliens board your ship/someone is injured, depending of their shirt color) so they would staff their stations and then move automatically to fix/kill/heal when needed. It wouldn't take much space, enough for an icon representing the crew member and then a button to change the station they're staffing and another toggle to set if you want them to stay at their station or leave to do stuff in the ship.
Because right now it's a bit weird to try and have your characters move in range of the enemies, move your engineers to fires in the ship and move your medics if someone get hurt. If the controls were more precise, maybe that would be fine, but with how small everything is, I don't enjoy it one bit. Also, why can you wait for weapons to shoot when they're ready? Just pop the minigame when a gun can fire, it pauses the game already so there's no worry you're going to die while you're shooting and waiting to fire when a gun is ready has no use.