Triangle Strategy Flow

I am about 10 hours into Triangle Strategy on my Switch. And while I like the game overall, I would say that it has some serious problems with the flow of the game. First of all, I spent less than half of those 10 hours doing tactical combat; the rest of the game was taken up by exposition: Cutscenes and "exploration" phases, which also mostly consist of dialogue. I just hope the ratio of combat to exposition gets better, because right now there is far too much exposition and not enough time where I as a player can actually do something interesting.

The second problem is that it seems as if there are no random or procedural battles at all. There are the battles in the linear story, and they come with a level recommendation. Right now the level recommendation is 9, while my characters are between level 7 and 8. So to get up to the recommended level, I can only do "mental mock battles" in the encampment. But there are only 5 mock battles to choose from, and only the last gives full xp. So I need to grind that mock battle several times until everybody is up to level 9. Some variety or random battles would have been a lot more fun.

Finally, while there are "exploration phases", which consist of talking to every NPC on the screen and collecting a few blinking spots of treasure, there is no real exploration in this game. You either have exactly 1 next story point to go for the next cutscene, exploration, or battle. Or you have that 1 story point plus an optional cutscene with "what happens at another location" for background info. At very few points in the story, only once up to now, there was a scene where my retinue voted where to go, and I could try to persuade them to vote the way I wanted. So, 10 hours played, chapter VI, and only 1 minor story branch (visit either A or B, but both will then be followed by C).

I do like the tactical combat system. But the rest of the game is rather "meh" to me. I just hope the game picks up in later chapters.