Hello! I’ve downloaded your pre-alpha build to give it a test shot. I wasn’t expecting much, pre-alpha doesn’t make it sound too awesome, but DAMN SON! Looks to me like you already have combat mechanics nailed. Having the individual rounds simulated, return fire, overwatch, action points as opposed to “move then shoot, or shoot them move”, all of it already gives the tactical gameplay a lot of depth.
On my first game I thought it was ridiculously hard, but I took a step back and looked carefully at the mechanics, now a few games later I’m willing to say even balance looks great. It’s brutally punishing (as one expects from a Gollop game!), yet fair and entirely manageable if you exploit the game mechanics correctly.
Only negative feedback at this point in time is that if you run a few games without restarting the program it gets brutally slow, but I suspect optimization is not exactly on top of your todo list just now. I might also tweak the vehicle mechanics a bit, I feel it’s currently a bit OP that I can have a guy pop out the back, fire a rocket, get back in and offload the HMG twice at the same target in one round. A potential solution to this would be to make the vehicle’s action point be modified by the driver’s leftover action point (with highest remaining action point being considered driver).
I can’t wait for the next public build, and I’m fair sure I’ma drop dead from anticipation long before we see the first preview of the strategic layer! 