I'm not in the alpha or anything, but I have seen the video on youtube. One thing I noticed is that the death animation for tiles is the same flipping + reduced alpha thing from Valley2 and SH. IMO it's not a great animation. It worked pretty well in SH, not so well in Valley2, and I think in this game there's a much more natural suggestion. Why not have dead tiles fall down into the void? I mean that's such a big part of this game, right?
I would even say that dead units could do the same. They could either phase down through the ground, or the ground could 'swallow them whole' by falling down. The tile would then come back up (maybe even with a slight bounce as it reaches its proper altitude) and the unit would be gone. This would all happen simultaneously for all dead units and would be pretty fast, but it would exploit the dynamic of the game to help cover up for missing animations.
Another, less important idea, is to have the units have 'weight' to them: as they move on the map, they'd cause the tile under them to sink a little, and to bounce back up once they leave the tile. This kind of thing would again serve the purpose of making the feeling of the animation more dynamic.
