I ended up pressing on with my Undead crisis game, essentially retrying battles a couple of times each day and then moving on to playing something else. Eventually, I prevailed and got the same anticlimactic crisis ending described upthread.
I think the game still feels way too early-accessy. The battle system won me over after I was initially skeptical (even though I'd still say it suffers from a lack of options), but all other systems feel unfinished and/or don't live up to their potential.
The missions are samey, the world feels generic, the skills are unbalanced and for the most part too low-impact ... reading the steam reviews, it sounds like they even significantly dialed back from what they already had in the official EA period.
A game like this can only really get good sales at $30 if at least enthusiasts can recommend it to other enthusiasts without reservations.
As in, "You have to play this, it has xyz which is really unique.". Battle Brother's xyz is combat icons that consist of bobbleheads, and even that is not unique as Unity of Command had a somehat similiar style.
That just doesn't quite cut it.
I really boggles my mind, because I can't imagine it'd be too hard to add some neat things such as more contract types, a better skill tree, maybe even a thin RPG layer (this game is clearly in the wrong forum and would belong in Strategy games).
The heavy lifting (game engine and system) is done and works well.
However...
I can understand that they see difficulties with introducing modding to their game at this point because that sounds like a lot of work. Still, people were yelling at them "Modding! Modding!" for a year or so. It was a really wanted feature, and they didn't listen back then. I would be really surprised and disappointed if they would start working on another title and abondon idea of modding once again.
If it's so hard to add translations or modding, they clearly made some grave mistakes when designing their codebase. Because it CAN be quite hard to shoehorn modding into a codebase that wasn't meant to accomodate it from the get go.
And if a codebase is like this, it could also mean making such things yourselves, as the developers, is just as hard.
In a way, official new content - new scenarios, new weapons, new character backgrounds, new ending crises, ... all those things are not that different to mods, after all.