Ok, tried it out... random thoughts/comments in stream-of-conciousness form. Don't read if you don't want to spoil anything.
Beginning's quite hard on legendary, as it should be, but I was having trouble even with half speed and so forth. Depending on how other ppl feel, you might want to tone it down a touch (especially if they want to have a hope of beating the changelings). Nice touch with making the faceless man slightly bigger. The level's pretty confusing in the middle, and it's hard to tell where I was supposed to go. Maybe the pregame/level hints (add those!) will help.. maybe not. Once I got to the raised area at the top of the map, I went left once, but nothing happened. I went right, got confused as where to go, then went left again and this time the two changelings/faceless man popped up. Not sure whether I didn't go far enough left or if something's buggy with the script.. I'll have to check that out. After having trouble in the beginning on legendary, I switched to timid, and still ended up with only a few people at the end (zerk hero, few wars, two jmen, one arc hero). At the westmost part of the initial south strip below the river, there was a large group of thrall standing around that didn't do anything until I got within dorf-bottle range, when they finally attacked. The dead peasants looked cool. Wait a second, I just realized I didn't use the arc hero's super duper way cool attack on the beginning two waves of thrall/souls/myrms, so don't tone it down on leg. The last part could use some revisions. The j-man is useless for taking out the Faceless Man (and I tried healing him), yet all of your units except for him are forced to stand away for a while. Worse, if the jman dies, you lose. I managed to juke my way away from him (nice long-range attack, btw), and sent in my zerk hero (not sure why i didn't send in any wars). Anyhow, he managed to take it out single-handedly, without a ton (iirc) of experience, and with only one "death swing" (or whatever), which I probably didn't even need. At first, I couldn't even see the final form of the Faceless Man (except for the pink stuff).. you might want to add a bit of color to make him more noticeable. I suggest lowering the terrain for the top part of the map.. the camera's too close to the action, and it's hard to see through the trees much of the time. If it's not too much work, and if the story doesn't tell us, you might want to make the player find the artifact first, so we know where we got it. When the reinforcements came, they scattered over the map, running in random directions until I selected them all and told them to join my group. Keep the mandrake roots.. they're necessary. Is the Faceless Man's lightning attack supposed to bounce back to him (it does)? The number of trees in the lower two thirds of the map can make it difficult in many places to set up my archers with a clear shot. I DON'T LIKE THE FACELESS MAN'S VOICE! It sounds corny and poorly recorded.
Wow.. that's hard to follow. I'll play it again a couple times (on leg, if i can do it right) and report back with any new observations. For the meantime, nice colormap, good scripting (save bugs mentioned above), and challenging even on Timid. Great job!
