OK. Getting ready to play what I am almost sure is the last mission. It's day 9 and we attack the Dam.. This is not a spoiler as you will see this coming a long way off.
I've spent about 15 hrs or so on the first play-through. Your mileage can, and will, vary as I like to stop and smell the roses along the way. I always say that to avoid having to just say I am slow. Still, I feel like I've already gotten my money's worth.
I like what they did with the difficulty levels. Once you decide what level in general to play at you can then fine tune even further. Nice. Unfortunately the level/tuning cannot me adjusted once you start the game and you won't realize what fine tuning you want to do until you've played the game a bit. Catch-22. So, get through the initial couple of missions and then revisit your difficulty options.
It looks like there is no <save> key, but it does seem to auto-save whenever you quit. To be careful I never quit until I finish a mission and then just hit <resume game> next time I want to play. So far, so good.
Still unable to find the in-game mission clock, although a timer does show up time to time. Of course that is meaningless unless you know how much mission time you have left. If someone finds it please let me know.
Speed seems to be the key to being awarded salvage, but there just doesn't seem to be enough to buy adequate new weapons. Of my 8 guys, 3 are still basically equipped with their original kit. Simple newbie mistakes probably cost me a couple of more items. We'll see how I do the 2nd time through.
First play through you cannot play every mission as your mission choices will send you towards some missions and away from others. Also, I did not see all the bad guys or their weapons. I suspect they will be seen in missions yet to be played.
Many events are purely random so you never quite know what is around the corner. I will give you a heads up though. I think it was Day 6 and the mission was to attack an enemy camp that had a radio tower so we could try to send a message to get rescued. Up until then I was facing maybe 4-5 bad guys per firefight. In this one, as I approached the hill with the tower, I triggered something and about 14 bad guys charged down the hill all at once! It took me 4 tries to win it and I was dreadfully slow doing it. I had to move a trooper forward to recon to lure a couple of bad guys towards me at a time without alerting the whole bunch. Just no way to do that quickly. A reasonable result is 17-18 salvage per mission. That one only got me 10. (sigh)
Most missions you get 4 troopers to use; some have 5. The Tower was 5. The up coming Dam is 5.
Wish me luck.