Hey Dan! Thanks for the great feedback. You're absolutely right about the combat. We wanted to try to add more feedback for the player so that they could understand what was happening. We started out by adding this in the UI with the elixir and 'action' buttons effects to let the player know what was going on there, but didn't very successfully provide feedback about the battle outcomes. I also agree that the pacing could be better in the battles. We do have some ideas for this going forwards, however :)
Thanks again for the great feedback and for playing our game <3