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 even the Awesome AI is no match for experienced human players, so the results often do not translate to matches with humans.
For tips on playing, see Multiplayer Melee Suggestions.
Melee variables
Frame rate
In Super Melee, the frame rate is 24 FPS (frames per second), i.e. a frame is 1/24 seconds.
World units
Distances in Super Melee are measured in world units, which are equal to 1/4 of a pixel at full zoom with a 320x240 resolution.
Facing
Most projectiles and ships have a direction in which they are facing; due to technical limitations and balance issues, the game only uses 16 possible facings, separated from each other by 22.5 degrees.