-Company of Crime stuff-
Yeah, I'm not very far into the game yet but I've already experienced a lot of the issues you mentioned.
I
think - and I'm not sure, since this has only happened once - the "being forced to auto-resolve" thing happens when you have a story mission in the pipeline at the same time. Like, when the first, non-story mission happens, the setup for a story mission is about to complete? Not sure, that's just my best guess for why it happened to me.
I didn't actually
use auto-resolve, though. Cancelled the mission, since if I'm gonna send my mooks to die or get knocked out I at least want to watch them get their arses kicked! Not that it makes much difference, since most of the missions you can do are, as you said, against a bunch of hapless civilians.
I can understand going in and visiting extreme violence upon a place of business to begin with, to get them to start giving you money or sell up or whatever, but just why does the game give you messages like "oh no! [RIVAL GANG] is robbing people at [BUSINESS YOU OWN/EXTORT FROM]! You oughta do something about this!" but then when you click on said business and choose the "beat up" option, when you eventually show up the targets you're supposed to beat are just the same terrified civilians who pay you money every week.
Definitely agree that it could use a fair bit of polish. That said, I haven't played enough to get bored of it yet. Haven't even encountered any weirdness with heat, since I've been playing pretty carefully in that regard. I saw something on the Steam discussions about better heat-reduction options unlocking later on, but who knows.
Edit: I just realised it's page 69. Tee hee.
Edit 2: Wait, so heat is just an outright "game over" screen after thirty days? Eurgh. I went and bought a laundromat and everything.
Considering there are all of two or three ways to lower it in the early game (that the game does
not tell you how to do) and each takes ten days at the least, this seems like a pretty poor design choice.
Perhaps I'll try the fuzz side of the game, see if that's any more functional in the current version. I was a bit disappointed that you don't get to start your own gang in the main story, anyway - playing as a vaguely defined, partially genderflipped Kray twins analogue was not exactly what I'd hoped for, haha.
Speaking of fuzz, prior to the heat thing my biggest gripe with the game was the way police officers can magically arrest you by simply throwing handcuffs at you. If the target character was grappled or stunned or something it'd make sense, but nope - suddenly a pair of handcuffs just appears on your wrists.
I wonder if you can pull that sort of BS whilst playing as the coppers, or if only the AI gets to pull such a daft stunt... hmmm.