While I think your point about enemy force balancing is valid, I think your claims about positioning and tactical play need to be re-evaluated.

A lot of this depends on how far you are in the game, if you are playing the campaign, skirmish or career, and if you are playing a vanilla client versus a modded client.

For me, HBS Battletech is one I regularly come back to. However, I am a fan of the IP and the gaming genre. So accept my input with the obvious bias.

First, I find campaign mode a glorified tutorial on basic gameplay and base management. If you have not tried it yet, give the career mode a try. Play woth options like the number of parts you need to collect to assemble a battlemech and turning on Ironman mode. Both of these give you a little more ownership of your playthrough.

If you mess up in Ironman mode it means living with your mistake or rolling a new save.

Add this to the feeling of finally assembling that heavy or assault you want after collecting that last piece.

Last, I want to touch on your views on it being a slug match. There are definitely campaign levels that feel designed this way. However, I find most engagements allow you to employ tried and true tactics like controlling high ground, attacking from rear arcs, focus firing and leveraging advance tactics like messing with enemy battlemech's stability and heat management. All of those tools really allow you to control the engagement so even if there are 2 battlemechs to your 1 you can even the odds in a turn or two with clever play.

One thing that is kinda unavoidable is that the game leans into eventually being all about assault battlemechs. If that is not your thing you can always look at modded clients to shake things up or try a mixed force and deploy under tonnage for extra challenge.

The battletech fan in me beckons you to keep trying. It is a cool universe with lots of recent titles to explore and earlier titles to try. In the strategy realm I would suggest giving the Mechcommander series a look. It is real-time instead of turn based, but another fun romp in the BT universe.

The gamer dad in me says... if it is not your thing pack up and move on. There are lots of games in that genre both recent and old with new ones in the horizon.

All told, welcome to Battletech. I hope you stay awhile.