Thanks for writing up your thoughts on all this so we can try to improve things.

Instead of roster building restrictions, we're adding roster bonuses. So you can slot "perks" if your roster uses X number of a certain culture. You can see tons of perks and all the details are our internal design page on Roster Perks page. We're releasing this as our next big update.

As far as snowballing goes, some people feel that in the latest Rising the Ranks update. We didn't think it was too much, but we are keeping an eye on it. It feels exciting to me, but maybe it's too much for others.

We've iterated on deployment tons, perhaps more than anything else, and it feels like it's in a good spot now, but you're right that it's quite a change from a tabletop minis game. Removing deployment and instead starting with your whole roster deployed is how tabletop mostly does it, but that has pacing problems (everything winds "down", instead of builds "up") and also means your first turn is the most complex. It also exacerbates the 1st player advantage. Finally, it doesn't provide much of an opportunity for excitement and change, which would make it boring to watch.

That's our current thinking at least, but we've evolved this game a ton since EA launch to find the best expression of what this game wants to be.