Though I still hope that even more priority will be given to fixing, balancing and optimization.
Since a few versions, the game is very laggy for me even on single player server and kinda crashing (reports sent, unless the .jar reporting application fails) relatively often (also, no intel graphic card, but good ol\' GeForce) while in the game itself the shields still are quite powerful, antimatter cannons and said shields can be made huge with little to no drawbacks and the hull itself in a fight between medium to big ships is laughtable protection, reinforced or not.