Breathtaking and holding potential
I'm joining on the bandwagon of "Wow, immersion! Complicated! Capitalism, yaaaay!". This is a unique take on a lightly-touched genre on Newgrounds that I could only hope be flushed out more in the future. While the design is obviously well planed, the implementation lacks shine in a few spots. I'll go ahead and second/third/eighth^45392 the "speed up combat" notion.
I'll get the more trivial things out of the way first. The music in the world map is very fitting and fun, but the quiet during the long combat is a bit awkward (although no music is better than extremely cheesy music that breaks the immersion). The town maps fit the theme well, but the lack of any features on the world map in general gets pretty boring. Doesn't need landmarks that would help navigation, but anything to make that more vivid would help, even if it is supposed to be a great wasteland.
The interface is where some of my main concerns are though that could help make the game a bit easier to grasp. For example, at the shop and equipment screen when looking at weapons, things like damage and accuracy could be highlighted more over, say, the weight and manual/automatic reload. Ammunition is a bit awkward to match up too, it would help if it included a portrait of the ammo type when you have the gun selected. Also for the inventory, separating the containers from the weapons/ammo would be very, very useful.
Random interface comment: people are having trouble finding the save files because the options menu is labeled with a question mark, it looks like clicking it would only open up the tutorial again. A floppy disk or something might work a bit better.
The in-combat interface is also a bit cumbersome. The actual buttons and statistics are dwarfed by the field of vision of the combat area. Increasing the size of the statistics for AP and load left in gun (perhaps a gauge or row of bars of some sort for either? something that can be 'read' on the fly, maybe even moved to overlay the combat view) would make it a bit easier to use. Also on the combat, the fighting area is far too large! Although I haven't reached anything near the 'end game' where I suppose there could be more characters, it seems silly to have a turn or two where both teams get closer to each other, even with very long range weapons. If the field of combat were smaller it would also reduce the need of the huge combat viewing area on the interface and allow for more room for buttons. Random thing that would help: allowing arrow keys to scroll around.
Two features that come to mind that might help is archiving the news and using under-burdened animals as mounts to increase the speed of people. The news archiving would be doubly helpful if you could find specific events for towns so that you only research for the current path you're taking. The latter might be included already, actually, so pardon me as I haven't had the spare cash to test out buying extra horses, and haven't encountered vehicles yet. It wasn't included in the tutorial so far as I could see, but it seemed weird to include the speed thing for animals if the speed is more or less limited by people walking on foot. Might make bandits a bit too easy to avoid but what's stopping them from stealing some horses for themselves? :)
Ack, I'll stop this wall of text here. You listed "use latest version" in the menu but I wrote this assuming there would be a sequel. It would be disappointing to not improve on it more since the game does give a feeling of immersion in the damn-near-apocalyptic world while giving a great deal of depth to the gameplay of this genre.
