Super-Melee
Super Melee was first introduced in Star Control II. It is an improvement over the standard melee found in Star Control I which pitted the hierarchy against the alliance in a series of dogfights. Super Melee allows melee-style combat between two parties of up to fourteen ships each. Teams can be made up of any of the twenty-five ships available in Star Control II.
Each team can either be controlled by a human or a cyborg. Cyborg opponents have three levels of experience - weak (standard in the original DOS Star Control 2), good, and awesome. In addition, each party is assigned a point value depending on how powerful the constituent ships are. Weak cyborg cannot use secondary weapons of its ships (except Pkunk Fury and Slylandro Probe). A human player is actually not necessary for the melee to run, so players are capable of running "simulations" to see what ships are more powerful, or by what degree. This is simply done by setting both combatants to the Awesome Cyborg setting to allow the full capability of the ship to be used (note that the AI is rather weak at Awesome too, so the results will often not match what would happen with human players).
For tips on playing, see Multiplayer Melee Suggestions.