[Special Note: I have been play-testing Wazzz's forest troll race for the last two weeks of the contest, so this is perhaps the race I am most familiar with. And they say familiarity breeds fondness, so I'm not going to mince my words with you Wazzzie, sorry ^^]
Concept [1/8]
Your race was pretty much faithful to the normal set up, with also meant that it does not offer any concrete new strategy. However I did find your 2-builder style interesting, where one of your builder is a combat unit who builds useful supporting structures. This gave me the extra tactic choice of build-as-you-attack way of playing. Other than that there is not much else in terms of concept.
Design & Theme [3/5]
Your forest troll race had 2 other subrace within them, the goblin and hoodoo. While the hoodoo complemented the forest trolls nicely, the goblins' weapondry struck me as too high tech for the forest trolls.
It was interesting to note that, your buildings were not forest-like at all, in fact they were buildings that belonged to a civilized race. Next time, call your race something like Troll Alliances
Game play & Balance [3.5/5]
Your race seemed to have almost every role covered by a unit, and I also liked the fact that try as I may, I couldn't find any unit to be overpowered.
Everything seemed to function the way you envisioned your ideas, so I couldn't really find fault with them even if I don't agree with how you wanted some of them to work out. But one thing I really didn't like is that you had too many specialized units with only one role. The units which I thought were specialists were Flak Cannon (anti-air only), Sapper (suiciding only), and the 3 mages - Seer, Shadow Priest and Wind Daughter (supporting roles only). That leaves me only the Marauder, Axethrower, Bear Rider and the base-bombing Airship to build my team around with. This sort of thing always left me playing the same strategy over and over, which wasn't fun.
The end word - everything toed the line, but nothing really stood out. You seemed to focus too much on each individual unit, and spent too little time planning out a strategy for them to work together with.
The Hero - I'll be frank with you. I liked the Ritualist's design and style, but I didn't like his abilities, apart from Flash Dance. The hero could use more direction - shall it be more of a dancer, more to summoning his rituals, or both? At his current state, he had four decent but totally different abilities with no synergy between them. His ultimate too, struck me more as a cool factor as opposed to a practical ability.
Fortunately his game play isn't bad. With a healing, summoning and damaging skill, he functioned more as an all-rounder helper for his army rather than playing some specific role, which was rather unusual for a melee agility hero. Though he is passable at this current state, I would suggest two improvements in the future . One is to make give his healing ability to a dummy caster instead of channeling it himself, which was dangerous for a melee-type. Secondly, I always thought that since we could have only 1 hero for our race, it would be a waste to spend it on summoning more combat creatures, which we don't need anyway. A more role-specific ability would have been much better here.
Favorite unit - Airship. Its just like the typical siege unit, only flying. Many people overdid their flying siege unit, but your idea was much better balanced. Good design.
Least favorite unit - Flak Cannon. You're most probably tired of hearing me say that I didn't like this guy. With just 280 hp and a ground unit who could only attack air, he really needed more hp and a ground attack, or simply make him an air unit so he wouldn't get bullied by enemy ground units. Plus what's the point of his mana shield, other than an excuse for more micro managing and to become a target for mana burn? You could have just gave him more hp instead /:
What I like
[+] Not overpowered, in fact a little on the weak side, which I like.
[+] Despite giving you an average score for theme, I liked how you mixed the different races together. You just needed to work out on the goblin's technology angle. Some of the names sounded nice and appropriate too, like the Bivouac, Wind Daughter, and the fire-shooting Totem of Conflagration.
What I dislike
[-] Some ideas for specialized units could use more testing and balancing, like the Flak Cannon and Sapper units. They pretty much only have one very specific role to play, thus not very useful.
[-] Lacked a strategy. Everything seemed in place, so why not be more adventurous and come up with a concept? Sometimes it is frustrating (lol) for me to see that you were reluctant to make radical overhauls to your designs that needed changing. The race still seemed pretty much 98.34% similar to the first one I tested.
[-] Broken one rule - file size. Your file size would be comfortably under the limit if you had taken care of some ridiculously oversized textures.
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I agree - I to wanted to do just about everything you suggested as improvement.. I also had plans to convert the blight into Goo which would allow for fast movement and "teleporting" by rapid movement in the Goo.
