Thanks a lot for the feedback. It's very useful to have the perspective of someone who's played many mech games in the past.
I'm definitely going to be overhauling the UI many times until I get to a point where I feel it's easy enough to understand. There are already tooltips if you hold right-click on equipment / weapons, but there definitely need to be more, and there's a bunch of areas where the mechbay UI has major failings - like, for example, the game doesn't explain what the different armor types (composite, KREM, reflective, EDA) even do, same with structure type and engines, etc. A lot of this is on my radar, and a lot of development time is going to go towards making the mechbay more comfortable and simple to use, considering it will account for 30-40% of the game.
I'm limiting the size of battles at the moment as anything beyond 1v1 is almost entirely untested, and may lead to performance or weird AI problems - but there is a setting in the 'gameplay' tab to enable 2v2 battles, if you'd like to try that out.
Thanks for checking it out!