Both winning and losing:
Making a note to delay winning until the start of your turn or something. And add more boolean toggles to events/popups. e.g. by default they shouldn’t be able to trigger if you’ve lost (and probably not if you’ve won)
Polearm popup: Maybe if they don’t turn her the first turn they have her, there’ll be a popup next turn.
9 turns on first fight is pretty normal. But if it still took multiple attempts for you who knows the mechanics from playing before, it’s probably still too hard.
Buttons: Adding a close button to the pause menu was something another playtester suggested late in the jam. I’m going to have a consistent position and look for close/resume button. Good to know they need to be more visible, though.
Mechanics reference: I’m kinda leery about adding too much stuff to any header, or adding too many headers, or having multiple headers that could plausibly contain the same info. I have an idea for how to do that, though.
Get Ready on someone with Trip: that should absolutely work. The only thing that prevents Get Ready is being out of range (which would also prevent it from popping up at all), or if you have too few Commands left. I’ll add a system for indicating why an action can’t be taken. Put a red highlight around the costs you can’t pay on the ability and/or the status effect that is preventing it. Should be pretty straightforward to do.
Extra damage before Endgame starts: I’m fine with people dealing damage before the limit appears, that’s kinda why I made the Endgame phase start at full health now instead of 5, so that I don’t need to specially give the boss invincibility, or begin Endgame immediately. Spending 1 Command to deal 1 damage usually isn’t really worth it when the boss starts at full health, but I want people to come to their own conclusions about how to play the game once they understand the mechanics.
Difficulty in the Endgame: I'm probably going to change Endgame a bit. There’s a some ludonarrative dissonance in how Endgame affects people even outside the map at the same strength (it’s not like a magic aura or something, it’s just meant to represent the fighting getting too frantic for people to rest and defend properly.)
Also probably have people cure Hurt if they stay in reserves for a while. I want to avoid situations where. Whenever someone gets Hurt, you spend effort to evacuate them, thus neglecting to defend your other characters. You end up in the Endgame with nobody dead, everyone Hurt and at low health, and now it's kinda hopeless.
That said, character death is an expected part of the story in Hardcore mode, and this first fight (though it’s a nonlethal spar) is meant to give the player the expectation that they can’t always save everyone.