Thanks for the in-depth review.
You're definitely playing against other humans. But you might not have had anyone else playing when you played! All the codes and owned nodes are set by real people. And you can see them moving around in the world if they're online at the same time as you.
The numbers on the nodes indicate the score your team gets for owning it. I think that's in the instructions somewhere, but it's easily missed. It's meant to add an incentive for players to fight over the higher value nodes in the middle, just so you get to see other players when there aren't many people online and playing.
The only penalty for retrying a node is that you can't see any of your history. There's nothing stopping you from retrying straight away. I was thinking of adding a cooldown, or force you to try a different node first or something, but it's already a complicated enough game and I didn't have time to add audio, so definitely didn't have time to add refinements. So while I take the criticism on board, I can hide behind the usual jam excuse of not enough time!