This game scratches an itch that I didn't know I had. A bit rough around the edges, but it's a good start all things considered. I completed the game twice on Hellichurl difficulty. Once using Nycto units, and once without using any Nycto at all and only breaking one statue. The gameplay loop is fun once you figure out what you actually need to do, and there are some areas that can challenge you even late game, at least until you've got multiple lawachurls or a select few heroines who seem to be nearly invincible with certain squad compositions.
Noticed a few bugs, think they've likely been pointed out but I'll list my experience anyway:
After you deploy a heroine any modification made to her squad will charge you the price for deploying her again, along with whatever the other units cost, except if you specifically use a Dark Wedge to reinforce. You also don't get a refund if you dismiss her, unlike every other unit in the game. This made it cost prohibitive to even think about experimenting with the early game captures, so please get that sorted out.
It seems that the game will spawn heroines back at the base if you just right click to activate the dismiss button, instead of when you actually click dismiss. This means you can right click again and cancel the dismissal and effectively clone any girl. You can actually deploy multiple instances of the same character, but for breeding they all count as the same character.
The Dragon Queller tree turns into a statue base instead of a tree stump if you burn it down.
I know for a fact this has been reported multiple times, but PLEASE make it so the units generated by partially upgraded villages can be sacrificed from the start, or better yet make it so that the player can choose which unit gets generated, or whether any are generated at all.
It's hard for me to make many accurate critiques about overall game balance without seeing the entire scope of the planned content, but there are a couple things I think are a bit off:
Please add a way to make sure that your units are in the order that you want them to be in, at the very least when defending. It would go a very long way toward reducing tedium of the constant defensive battles on multiple fronts.
It seems the intention might be to scale the stats of enemies using a global threat meter. Do this by modifying the contents of the squads or number and type of squads deployed instead of silently increasing the base stats of enemies if possible please.
Geo and Dendro hilichurls should probably give 10 instead of 20 base defense per unit when added to a squad. When you can add 30-50 of them to a squad the resulting amount of defense on the character is so high that they become nearly unkillable, and if they have Barbara or a Hydro samachurl, or god forbid Jean backing them up they seem to be almost immortal even in the hardest fights(Keep in mind I'm coming at this from the hardest difficulty too). Even with less defense a piece they'd still result in a massive amount of defense with numbers, but at least they'd need healing or pillar support to avoid getting chipped away quickly, at least until the player boosts their defense 10 times or so with training.
For some reason Keqing has the same squad size as the city boss characters, despite being one of the most mobile and high damage heroines available. I don't know if it would be appropriate to limit her to exclusively using specters like other hyper-mobile characters, but she should at least have the same squad size as Noelle, who is of the same tier as her on the threat meter.
I've got some more systemic critiques, but I'll cut it at this for now until I've got a more solid understanding of the scope of the game. It's a very solid start so I've got high hope for this project.