I've still got my copy in the attic (sitting on top of the Solaris VII box), and it's been over a decade (closing in on two) since the old gaming group played it, but I'm keeping it.
As pointed out, there were some flaws, particularly the mercenaries being almost counter-productive. It actually helped to exterminate them in senseless attacks as quickly as possible, to do as much damage as you could while losing them. Once the cards started coming into play, your mercenaries were as dangerous to you as to your opponent. There really needed to be about a 2 turn "contract length" before they became vulnerable to renegotiation: hire them at the start of your turn, and at the end of your NEXT turn, flip their "card" over; at that point, they become vulnerable. There should also be a (generally low) "Loyalty" rating, where if you win the bidding for them, there's still a small chance that they won't change sides. Some units should have a high enough Loyalty rating to serve as "slightly questionable" House troops for whoever hired them, rather than practically guaranteed traitors. As it stands, no sane player would pay to rebuild a mercenary unit.
I also think the Liao Death Commandos cards were slightly overkill, where they should be split evenly between Liao-only and those usable by any faction. As for bribing leaders, since so many of the House Lords could be bribed, it seriously paid to keep one of the 100% loyal ones back at the capital, and generally give the best troops to the most loyal leaders.
You could only rebuild a few of the units back up to original strength (if you got the cards), and in most games, I ended up with far more armor units, which were often stronger than the depleted House 'Mech units, and cheaper to replace if you lost them. The idea of choosing which unit to suffer casualties to may have worked from a purely gameplay perspective, but wasn't very "realistic".
The real clincher was that the game with all those little counters took hours to set up, and then you didn't have a whole lot of time left to play before having to mark everything down so you could set it back up again. That's assuming you didn't have a secure place to leave it overnight or until next week. For those of us with little brothers, pets, or parents who didn't want it sitting there for a week, it was a problem. I suspect that a computerized game would solve most of the issues, where you could quickly reload a campaign in progress whenever you wanted, and unit stats could be depleted (or rebuilt) a bit more gradually and losses randomized between units. I'd just about kill for a good BT-universe strategic-level game on PC, particularly with both single-player and multi-player options. Succession Wars was a good first attempt, but a major rethink might be a better plan.
