Helias clearly is a predatory animal

Helias clearly is a predatory animal

and in this map he was allowed to follow his most basic instincts. Before we get to that part, I shortly want to discuss the introductory mission with Dario.

The introduction was soured for me at first due to the locked Esc button. I feared that skipping briefings would be locked throughout the whole game, which thankfully turned out to not be the case. Mechanically, running from Varg's henchmen worked beautifully. Dario's guards give him more than enough time to run away and reorient himself on a completely unexplored map. The little fight events that are revealed as you get close to them are a nice detail. The only thing missing is a defeat condition - should Dario die, the defeat screen doesn't come up.

After Dario arrives at his destination, he sets up shop somewhere else and lets Helias handle the situation. I found this whole setup to be very well thought out. From the balancing of the incoming resources, the available settler attraction limit to the fact that neither taxes nor leader pay is being collected. Everything is tailored to that specific kind of gameplay, where you have to use a fixed amount of resources to reach your goal. I only wished to be able to buy and sell surplus resources for money, since the village missions made me wait a considerable length of time for the required resources to come in. Especially the amount of wood needed was not aligned with the amount of wood provided.

Speaking of village missions: I found those to be greatly varied and the difference in difficuly also made very clear in which order one is supposed to tackle them. Escort missions are usually on the irritating side. Finding the correct time to start the wood delivery mission made it very doable though. One minor gripe I have is that the key the miner is looking for spawns only after Helias has received the task to find it. It would be more organic if Helias could find the key beforehand and just hand it to the guy when he asks for it.

Most of the time I let Helias be his true self and had him lie in wait for incoming high tier troops to convert. Those were usually occupied with attacking Oakhaven's defenses, so they wouldn't notice the guy run in and snatch one of them up. That way I was able to assemble a sizable force that I first used to free the southern village and then the enemy fortress. The cooldown on this ability is not too high so that kept me busy while my resource supplies piled up.

Concerning map design, I found it to be solid overall. However, you might want to consider moving away from using randomly generated maps as a baseline. Even though you alter them quite substantially here and in your previous map, one can never quite rid it of that very characteristic look. Should you have problems starting off your map design without some basic structure, it can be very helpful to outline a rough sketch of a top down view of your map. Plan ahead what would happen at what point in the mission and fill in details as you go.
Secondly, as a very concrete suggestion: Entities on steep slopes usually don't look good since they appear to be floating. Especially large rocks don't hang onto slopes like that in real life but rather drop to the very bottom of them. Alternatively, you could grant your slopes more area, making them less steep.
Example

Finishing your map took me exactly 1 hour. I ended up having Helias take cannon tower hits in between attack waves while all snatched archers and cannons destroyed them. Some archers were able to sneak in on the very southern side of the entrance and I could easily dispatch of spawner tents one after another. All spawning troops were blissfully unaware. The ending kind of took me by surprise since the victory condition tent was not particularly well guarded.

To reiterate, I was surprised by how well this map was put together, especially on the scripting side of things. I reckon you have previous programming experience? The way the player is expected to handle the enemy is not featured all that often and the way you implemented it here works flawlessly. Hats off!

I'm very much looking forward to your next maps.

Best,
Fritz