In which we will have a battle in two perspectives.

The battle of our protagonists against the imperial scouting party starts with a briefing screen classic, the map. We’re informed about the win- and failstates of the battle:And we listen in on a short discussion of tactics, presented in what I call JRPG-presentation. If this dialogue design has another name or is used in western game styles, please do enlight me.
Then we’re neck deep in the tutorial. I’ll now sum up the basic fighting mechanics.
We start in Command Mode. This is an avian view of the battlefield, with the positions of our troops, the known positions of the enemy, and the environment (it’s a map after all) including cover on it.The shinies on the line next to the turn counter with “CP” written on it are our command points. The list is an an overview of our troops and in the lower right corner we have the status window of the selected unit with current health and AP. We can spend a command point to take control over one of our units, which takes us into a third-person-view.
Here we see Welkin standing behind the sandbags in front of the bridge, a short distance in front of our starting position. See if you can find it on the map.
In the upper left corner we see the health display oh the currently targeted enemy, in the lower right we have our health and what passes for our weapon reel. The Gallian-1 rifle has unlimited ammunition, and Welkin has full health. We can either crouch behind the barrier or jump over it, and we can switch into target mode. The bar on the lower edge of the screen is our AP-bar. Moving around drains it, thus defining our maximum range for movement. Using the basic rifle doesn’t use additional AP, but we can fire only once per turn. I don’t know yet whether this will change with other weapons over the course of the game.
To shoot, we go into the target mode. We can choose a target and fine tune the placement of the crosshair on him. Shooting happens automatically, the dice roll depending on cover, obstacles in the line of fire and how much of the crosshair was actually on the target (bullets always hit within). Someday this will be shown with a screenshot, and on that day I’ll also talk about damage types and such.
The yellow lines are lines of sight to enemies, indicating, well, lines of sight. “Over there is an enemy”.
When we’re done we end our action and when all CP are used, we end our phase. The enemy has his phase, working with the same rules, and afterwards a new turn begins. We can also use several CP on the same unit: a re-selected unit starts with fewer AP due to exhaustion, but we can cross longer distances this way, either to run away or to get around enemy positions.
After each turn all units regenerate a given amount of damage, allowing us to pull back wounded units and let them regenerate.
At the end of the battle we get this probably useful rating:
We get a B-ranking, 200XP and 500 DCT, and we’re yet to find out what we can do with it.
I like the idea of using a continuous AP-drain during non-tiled movement, as opposed to classic turn based systems. If feels less restricted. It also feels less exact, as we can’t place our units on the exact tile THERE where we want them, but I’m willing to take that tradeoff.

With the three scouts dead, our protagonists regroup. Alicia orders the bodies to be buried, and, after reassuring us and probably herself that she will do everything she can to protect this town – her town – even going to war, she releases some dandelion seeds.
Okay. Seeds from the lion’s paw, as Welkin tells us. Alicia wants to remember after the war not only all the people killing people, not only the atrocities that are sure to come, but also that even in war new life will find its way. We shall see how this turns out.

This is the combat system in all its Chapter-1-glory. Things will probably get worse. The presentation given in this post was way worse than I intended, as I took all the wrong screenshots and cannot replay the bloody battle. The material I have for the next battle – in the town square of Bruhl – is much better (but still far from optimal), and I hope to get the hang of it before the credits roll.
I’m not that far into the game at the time of writing this, but if things go on the way they are, story- and battle-posts will alternate. But we will see.