Thank you, this is the most in-depth feedback I've gotten and I really, really appreciate it. I'm sorry I missed the voting period but I'll get to your game because "complex" excites me. I've been working on the UI. This is what the new gameboard looks like. Also working on much better tutorializing and player onboarding.
Your cash ($$) and AP yield are determined by the operations and operatives you have installed. The cash yield is the number in the top left of an op card, and the AP yield is in the top right.
Yes, an operative sortie is your only option to attack directly. And yes, the most common reason not to sortie if it would get an operative killed, but you can get more tactical than that, sortieing only on the turns the operative has a 'good target' and saving their secrecy by not sortieing on some turns. You can theoretically win by killing the enemy, by the way, when you sortie you can click on the OpFor HP, but enemies in the back row will 'block' your operative, like MTG. Occasioanlly, though, the timing of spawns and advances means there's no intruders on the back row to block and you can get through to damage OpFor directly. I uh, don't think it's actually possible to win this way in the jam build, though. I was aiming for "very difficult to get this alternate win condition" but landed on impossible.
AP is spent to cast certain orders. Some orders cost cash, some cost AP, some cost both, for instance 'Engineered Commodification', the 'print moeny' card, costs only AP to cast. The AP cost of an Order card is the number in the purple box at top right.
A CM is a countermeasure, the orange cards you install in board slots. Any permanent that's not purple is a CM. Most intruders have 'summoning sickness', but intruders with 'RAPID' start coming at you as soon as you spwan. Other than that it seems like you mostly get it? The only tricky thing is that cost is upper left for all non-operative cards, whereas for operatives, top left is cash yield, and top right is ap yield. So they're in the same places on the card as an Order card, but they generate resources, they don't cost them.
Thank you so much for playing my card game (I put a lot of work into polishing it to look slick and sound good that probably would have been betterr spent tutorializing) and giving such in-depth feedback. "What is clear to a TCG/deckbuilder player and what isn't" is one of the most valuable kinds of feedback I can get!