Ran a game this evening for a few friends and it was good fun. We did an untimed dry run just to get a feel for the rules and then a proper game with timer etc. It's definitely fun and mechanically works really well, but could use a bit of tightening up in terms of the actual rules.
It wasn't hugely clear to us, for example, how control of a sector worked - when it says that two or more units "repel" a threat, for example, we took that to mean that having two or more units (or threats) in a sector effectively marked it as no longer contestable (with the exemption of the mech or the special action of Response).
That also makes it unclear what the purpose of improving / splitting units with the standard Research action is - does improving serve to control the sector, or does it have to be a process that takes place over multiple turns i.e. improve on turn 1 and split (giving control) on turn 2?
With shielding counting as control of a sector for the purposes of winning this also ended up making research a little OP - at least in our two play sessions, both had shielding as a major focus of the win.
I hope this is helpful and I really don't want this to be seen as saying this is a bad game. We had a lot of fun playing it and will definitely play it again, it's just that we ended up having to "house rule" a couple of things to make it work.
This was good fun and, bar some very minor issues, has an extremely fun core. I would really like to see you continue developing this and other games and will definitely keep an eye out for what comes next.
(P.S. the map that Crosbie produced was massively helpful in playing the game - if you can come to some arrangement to license their work for future iterations I would highly recommend it).
(P.P.S. we won in around 12 minutes, maybe a 15 minute default timer would have given some extra tension to the experience?)