Hi! Thanks so much for trying our game and for the feedback. It's greatly appreciated. We're looking forward to trying the other submissions, including yours, and will definitely leave feedback when we do!
The difficulty is somewhat intentional. The idea was to encourage players to think several rounds ahead. The game is designed so that it's very feasible to lose two or three rounds in a row, and then make it all back with a very good round later by stockpiling power cards and strong civilian cards. That's why we went with a multiplier approach - and also the reason we added in locked cards at all. Played this way, "intended" difficulty is very winnable, albeit quite slow to do so.
The idea was to try and capture some of the attritional nature of the war. In the real battle for Chasiv Yar, this back-and-forth exchange of land (at very high human cost) was quite common.
However, I think this strategy is fairly difficult to come up with alone, and I think we definitely need to provide an interactive tutorial to try and explain this a bit better. You could probably tell by the rough in game tutorial that this was rather rushed!
Thanks again for giving our game a go!