These changes all sound great. I love the idea of rest & recovery.
Viewing post in Copperhead County August + Experimental Branch Update comments
I just playtested them with a couple of people and was really happy with the results. The project stuff felt especially exciting — we really easily moved into identifying how positions could work, and played a couple of project scenarios with different consequences, and it felt really natural and alive with possibility.
I also really liked rest & recovery. Something else I like about it, and forgot to mention here, is that I like how it orients "rest" as something that happens by default in downtime, and then treats "indulgence" as something extra on top. That feels more natural to me.
One thing I'm still kicking around a bit is whether rest might get OP during the endgame — we talked about a possible solution (making it "rest OR recovery") but I was unconvinced by it, and we also settled on it not really being a big problem.
It's so hard playtesting the stuff that might not be a problem until down the road a while! It seems like a lot of games don't even get a full campaign in playtesting, so it's great that you have that opportunity. I'll be interested to see how you settle into these changes or what further iterations you come up with. Also may have to figure out whether I can steal Rest & Recovery for my own game haha.