I love the premise of this game but wow the gameplay is absolutely awful.
Why is it that enemies sometimes damage me when I attack them? Why can I sometimes select the attack button but other times I can't (seen in attachment)? Why is it that sometimes when I attack, I do 1 damage, no matter what type of unit I attack with, but other times the same unit will do a lot more damage, despite the enemy not even blocking? Managing massive amounts of goblins and manually placing them into units is a chore. Keeping track of generations for breeding is ridiculous, it should just automatically pick the best possible. Why is that when I'm assembling a team, it doesn't tell me what's currently already assigned when selecting a unit? I keep accidentally adding the same unit to different spots and accomplishing nothing.
Keeping track of food and feeding for seedbeds and new generations of goblins is a chore. Then to add insult to injury, the core game has a limited time period, and it's not even a long amount of time, so you feel rushed and like everything you do is wrong. I think the developers overthought this one a little. It's very rough around the edges. Everything about it is good other than the actual gameplay itself. I can't even find a cheat engine table for it either to actually make it playable. Disappointing.
Edit: According to a camera translation, the attachment says "Cannot be selected because of insufficient range." Again, what does that mean exactly? The game does a poor job at explaining anything. Why is there a range in the first place? Why doesn't it tell me about that when I'm assembling the team? I guess there's two front rows and two back rows. The menus and all the visuals do hardly anything at all to portray that. I guess the ogre has to be in a front row?
A lot of your complaints are explained in game, or are normally so easy to understand that it shouldn't need to be explained to anybody even remotely familiar with these types of games. I don't know how to say that politely, lol. People not understanding the breeding mechanics I could agree on, that's something that can fuck you over and it's never really explained in full.
Enemies sometimes attack you when you attack them because it has a battle system like that. Attacks are countered as long as the receiving end is still alive. It's turn based but acts like the attack is happening in real time, where the enemy would have time to respond/counter. This is pretty common. Melee units also can't counter back row units.
Range as mentioned is shown in the goblin tooltip.
Has to do with if your supports are still alive on your lead goblin or not. They count for a lot of your damage. Once they die, your damage drops significantly.
Managing gobs is pretty easy, I don't know what to say here. Mostly you keep normal gobs as supports and you swap your best gobs into your lead slots.
Breeding is a main component of this game, automatically picking the best option would take away from the options/versatility this game allows and requires. There are reasons not to always put your absolutely best units in certain slots (Because they can die). There are reasons to not always breed your strongest gobs (They can inherit skills you don't want them to). You want to be able to protect your breeders, but at times, you may need them to fight to succeed as well. Sometimes you need to sacrifice some gobs to make a future fight easier (Enemies hold their hp for a while when they're on defense). The game needs the option to choose, that's what allows you to overcome the situations you can run into in this game.
Yeah, the game is timed, but it's designed that you'll fail the first time and have to Newgame+ Think of it like you're actually a group of goblins fighting the world. You're at a disadvantage and aren't really supposed to win. Especially your first runs. Once you understand how all the mechanics (Especially the breeding) work, you'll do much better.
Summary:
There's not much wrong with this game for the genre it's trying to be. It's just a matter of if you're used to this kind of game and like challenge or not. You have to learn here to play this game well. It's not something you can just pick up and dominate at immediately. Everybody had the period of "Wtf is going on", it's just a matter of if you want to figure it out and like the challenge, or if you wanna throw your hands up in the air and give up when that happens, lol.