Gratuitous Tank Battles GUI feedback

Slightly disorganised thoughts, but I hope something useful in them.

This was my first time playing GTB, and I'm not generally a fan of tower defence type games although I've played the first 15 minutes of many over the years.
I played the first three campaign missions as defender; against scripted enemies; using the default set of defensive units; on the medium difficulty setting. Lost quite a lot more games than I won, but was too proud to turn down the difficulty. I also played one game as attacker, and poked around the unit customisation stuff a bit.

My first impressions were of feeling overwhelmed. Quite a lot of text to read through and mechanics to understand. It's not really a GUI thing, but I would have liked to start with a simpler set of units both to use and to fight against.
I found the default game speed to be far too fast for me. I was comfortable playing at 0.2x or 0.4x speed when defending.
I'd have liked to be able to pan the camera around with the mouse while placing units. Either dragging with right button (although I know the right-click is already used to cancel the unit) or even by holding down the mouse wheel. Allowing selection of units to be placed from the keyboard somehow would be nice too, although I guess problematic if you get access to many units later.

Ok, actual GUI stuff:
I found the descriptive text on my units "good against armour, protected from cannons" much more useful than the grid of icons above it. I simply didn't understand what they meant. After I spent some time with the unit edit stuff I began to recognise them slightly more.

I would have found it very useful to have the tooltip for each unit show some kind of graphical display of how much damage it does against armour/shields/infantry, and also how much armour/shield/internal health it has.
It would make sense for the display of the unit's defences to match how the health of the unit is displayed when it is deployed, but with some added indication of what the total health is. Maybe the thickness of the ring could correspond to total health.

The graphics do a good job of displaying how damaged enemy units are, but I still found myself wanting to see their health more exactly. Especially as I was sometimes unsure if a unit had a shield or not if they weren't currently being shot at.

Similarly I would have liked to be able to mouse over an enemy unit and get a summary of it. Does it have shields, does it have a laser or a cannon, that kind of thing.

I never quite worked out how I customise which units I have available to me when defending.

A couple of small bugs with the tutorial messages that come up when playing for the first time:
The message explaining that infantry can only be placed in trenches overlaps with the tooltips describing the units I can place.
The message explaining about clicking dropped dog tags blocks input (it creates the blue background effect) but doesn't pause the game.

Totally unrelated to GUI, but are you able to add v-sync or some kind of frame limiter? I was playing at 700+ FPS most the time, which was impressive but made my graphics card work far harder (and hotter) than it needed to.