Best power setup is shield with 15% block innate and axe/sword. You can easily get block rate over 50%, making you basically immortal with heal+defense+regen. For leveling up, I found and enchanted a staff that gave me about 80% experience bonus, which is used to clear up everything until the boss fight.
There are a lot of optimizations to the user interface that can be made. But please, make it a priority to have a "low CPU" mode with reduced graphics/no graphics. Battles with 150+ ships on each side can be frustrating.
Thank you for playing :)