I almost gave up before understanding how to play, but once I did it was fun :)
I like the idea and the mechanic, but I think there are 2 design parts not fitting together : merging units (very cool mech' btw) and the tactical difficulty curve. In a tactical, you begin with only a few units, to understand the gameplay first, and then gain more units and a variety of them, to improve the strategic gamefeel.
What I like in M5 is to merge units, but with doing that, I have less of them, less options, and so, less winning strategies, which feels wrong : I want to do both !!
Hopefully, I think there are tons of design solutions that doesn't imply to change your core gameplay ! Honestly, I would enjoy playing this kind of game on mobile :)
(also, congrats for programming this alone, it looks like a lot of work !)
Viewing post in M5 (Mecha Moon Mission: Mashup Mix) jam comments
Thank you so much for the comment!
If I had an hour to add one more thing before the submission date, it would have been a controls/guide page. I ran out of time though and had to rely on people reading the project description which I feel was a big mistake. I also agree that it could have been fun to allow the player to get more units, but I ran out of time though before I could play with the formula. I was finishing the enemy AI hours before the deadline, so there's so much I would've liked to tweak and play with that I just didn't have time for. (You assumed correctly, there was a lot of programming work to do already lol)
I appreciate the sentiment that you might be interested in playing something like this on mobile. Maybe I'll polish M5 up or release something similar for those types of devices someday. :)