This seems to be a great game, but the learning curve is very steep. Which is actually no problem, I have been playing all day, and am beginning to get a feel of the game. The UI is a bit awkward, though.
I really like the idea of selecting units and menus by just hovering the mouse over them (no click!), good thinking!!! But it was very, very difficult for me to learn to use the right mouse button to select units in the various list views, and then give orders with the left button, contrary to all other games. But in conjunction with the no click selection method it seems to be logically consistent, and I am beginning to get used to it, even like it.
I found out the hard way that the most important view for controlling the action is the 2d screen. Maybe you should tell the gamers this? I almost gave up on the game after trying for several hours to make things happen in the 3d view. In the tutorial and the manual you focus a lot on all the different possibilities the player has, which is okay in a manual, but not in a tutorial. The information in the manual convinced me that this game will last for a very long time, because of all these possibilities. In a tutorial I think it is more important to show me just one way of playing a simple game, then I can study the manual to get the full depth of the game.
But I still have one serious problem: The camera controls. I simply do not like to hold the right mouse button (or any mouse button) down continuously, I will just end up as a onearmed cripple. I know I can use the arrow buttons or the numpad, but they are kind of jerky on my computer. What happened to just pushing your mouse at the screen borders with no clicking, like every other game nowadays?
A minor problem is the zoom function, imho rolling the wheel backwards should take your helicopter up (like zoom out), while rolling it forwards should take it down (like zoom in). Please implement an option to customize this.
I am playing on a 1680x1050 display, so all my soldiers look like fat dwarves, not to mention the horses. But I see that this is a problem only in the demo.
I am looking very much forward to the release of the final game. Keep up the good work, JMM, and don't let any suggestions delay you. Get a working game out, and fix the problems and implement the suggestions with patches.