Bridger wrote:

I'm having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how the movement system works.  From what I can tell: units have 4 movement points, and when entering a hex they pay the cost to enter the hex.  If they don't have enough movement to enter, they can't enter (similar to Civ 6).

However, hovering over a tile only explains the "base move cost" and there is clearly something else going on with rivers (and I assume roads).  Specifically, rivers are very inconsistent with verisimilitude:

1. Crossing from one side of a river to the other seems impossible to do in a single move early on (the river 'stops' your movement).  This is good, and intuitive.
2. Moving from one river hex to the next seems to have reduced movement cost, and this too is intuitive.
3. However, if you move along a river into a T junction (up the spine of the T), you can then cross over to the other side for free?  What's that about?  If you try to cross over the top of the T normally, it takes 2 moves.  But if you move into the spine and then across, it works in one move.  Not consistent, and not intuative.
4. Then in battles, rivers are a liability.  OK, it is intuitive that crossing a river as part of an attack would be a liability, but the problem with HK is that your units are forever on Schrodinger's Embankment. Are they on the near side or the far side? As far as Humankind is considered, they are on both until they participate in combat, and at that moment they are considered to be on the 'wrong side'.
   Defending against an attacker who is crossing the river should be a boon, not a penalty!  The game gets this entirely backwards which is very unintuitive. 

Honestly, you'd solve a lot of these problems by putting rivers back on the hexsides where they belong.  I know it's likely far too late for such a change, but I honestly can't think of a way to easily create consistent & intuitive movement and combat rules with rivers inhabiting hexes.

I'm not entirely sure I agree on the final point, as I think the current in-hex river implies that the combat units occupying river tiles are in river-transit - this explains why you pay all your movement to enter the river system as you must fashion pontoons/river transports/etc and no further river movement penalties are applied, and so makes sense for a combat debuff. It does however need explaining as a debuff applied because of being in-river at the time, not "crossing" the river as most of the time the unit is defending on the river tile, so from a visual perspective they aren't crossing anything and it doesn't make sense to be described as that even if from an in-universe perspective they would be in the process of that.

I do agree that the river movement system needs better explanation in the tooltips, you can figure out the mechanics of it easily enough as you've described, but it should tell you upfront how they work specifically.