* Select all feature for the fleet view. A lot of times I want to select all the ships in a fleet exept one. For example, if I just sent a fleet of assassins, a scavenger and an interceptor to take a planet, and now I want to send everyone exept the interceptor to the next planet/asteroid. The easiest way to do this would be to have a button (or maybe ctrl+click, alt+click, or the universal ctrl+a) to select all the ships in the fleet, and then I could just shift click the interceptor to remove it from the selection.
* Select all ships of a type. To continue from the last item, a feature to select all the ships of the same type would also be nice. After starbase attacks I usually want to move the fleet to the next base. Only I want to send my faster ships there separately, so they can secure my staging area, and heal some hitpoints while waiting for the slower ships to get there, or I want to send my bombers to a different sector to wait for more bombers while the rest of fleets moves to take planets or asteroids etc. So now I have to shift+click each bomber in the fleet to pick them out of the fleet. Maybe a ctrl+click for selecting all ships of the type that was clicked?
* Selecting which corner of a sector you want your ships to go. Each sector has four corners, and most of the time the fleets end up moving to the right corner, or it doesn't really matter where they sit as long as the sit there. But sometimes, it really matters which corner the ships pick. The most important place where this matters is your own starbase. If your base is empty, new ships appear at a random corner of the base. This means, that if you want new ship(s) to start heading SW (as in South-West), and they appear the NE corner of the sector, they basicly have to travel an extra sector to get where they are going. I posted about this in another thread here: http://dreamspike.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=66#p66, so I won't repeat everything here, but sometimes a new ship appearing in the wrong corner can be a matter of life and death. What about this: Let the player choose which quadrant of the station new ships appear if there are no ships stationed at the starbase? A simple method could be selecting the starbase, and then right clicking one of the corners of that sector. You could visually verify the selection with the standard green "move-here" dot, and maybe add an arrow or a single corner marker or something to that corner for permanent display. (To clarify that: a claimed planet has corners in the players color around it. Draw a similar symbol to the chosen corner of the starbase)
* Save/Load. Admit it, this game is hard. Damn hard at times. And the fact that you can't save the game makes it even harder. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, as it forces you to play things safe and not take unnecessary risk. But still, the ability to save the game might increase this games appeal to the more casual gamers, and overall make the harder levels a bit easier, when you don't have to restart after that huge armada that should have wiped out the enemy base with ease got reduced to scarp metal by the defenders
Really, a single save slot would be enough to allow to save the game before or after cruzial battle. Even though a mission should only last for about 20 minutes, it often takes 30-40 minutes to finnish a map, because a lot of the time is spent with the game paused (at least I pause the game often to give orders). The ability to save the game would also allow for quitting the game in the middle of a mission, without losing all the hard work you've put in to it. Since one rarely completes the harder levels on the first try, you might spend 30 minutes just learning the level, and then another 30 to get it going, and just when you have everything going smoothly something happens and you are forced to leave the game. (You know, wife and kids come home and demand attention, you should have been in bed an hour ago because you have to wake up for work in the morning, you noticed that your lunch break you decided to spend with the game ended 30 minutes ago 
) So if you don't want to make the game easier by allowing saving during the mission, at least allow saving when quitting. Did you ever play Nethack? I did, a lot. In Nethack (which is a great adventure/RPG game in case you don't know this game from years past) you can only save the game when you quit. And when you come back, your save game is immediately deleted. So you can't save the game to ward of death before a difficult attempt or such, but only to preserve your game when you have to go do other things. (You know, that "life" thing that often gets in the way of a good all-night gaming session) I rarely finnish a map in 20 minutes, but I often have an extra 20 minutes I could spend playing the game.* Window mode. Because the game is designed to be run at 640x480 resolution, it would be perfect if the game could be run in a window. This would allow one to keep the game on the desktop, and more easily play while doing other things (like working).
* A little crash bug I've found: This week I've been playing the game mainly on my laptop, and have found that SWC really doesn't like some power saving features. If I close the lid of my laptop, it's display is automatically turned off. When the display turns back on, SWC crashes if it was the active application at the time. I first discovered this when I closed the lid to get to the back of my laptop for plugging it in to a power outlet, and was a bit shocked to see the game crash when I got back to it. Also if I put my computer to sleep or hibernate it, SWC crashes when the computer wakes up. Since the game can't be saved, I've sometimes left the game in the background and just hibernated my computer when I really had to stop playing, but unfortunately this has led to the game crashing
My laptop is running Vista SP1. This isn't something I expect you to spend days and nights figuring out, but just thought you should know.Also, I have some ideas that would be more appropriate for a sequel than a patch, so if you have plans of making a sequel for SWC or another game in the same genre, send me a PM or an email, and I'll tell you what I have
I hope you find these suggestions useful, and consider adding at least the first three items on the list to the game in a future patch.
I do have a 3-day weekend coming up and definitely count on beating this one.
Of note, the one thing I like about SWC is that it doesn't get tedious at all. Sure, it's a very simplistic game but the strategy for each map can vary so much and although very tough to beat, I don't mind it. In fact, I told my wife I just 'had' to beat Black Market. Once I figured it out, it was easy (like 20 armor left) I didn't know why I tried like 6-10 times before that. But it's sure rewarding to know "I BEAT IT". Say that for all the other recent PC/Wii games I tried and just stopped without finishing - Twilight Princess, Colonization II, CIV IV (yeah), Okami, Mario Kart. Heard ROTK XII is out but think that game's waay too massive to even think about given how much damage all that micromanagement may do to life.
: Maybe some kind of online scoreboard will help boost the competitive spirit or at least allow others to see what's 'possible.' There are a couple of later galaxies I scathed by (1 armor) and others I flat-out conquered (20-30 armor) and it would be nice to know where the in the SWC pack we all are. Highest scores/rank get first dibs on the SWC II beta. 
I always wanted to know if people have found better ways of beating the galaxies than me.