YMMV / Battle for Wesnoth

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • When Asheviere told her son (who was complicit in her grab for power) to go fight Delfador himself, was she hoping he'd win and end the war quickly? Or lose, and get rid of the last barrier to taking absolute power for herself?
  • When Haldric tells the Wose leader Elilmaldur-Rithrandil about the orc invasion in The Rise of Wesnoth, he directs Haldric to the Ruby of Fire under the reason that it is a powerful artefact that might help Haldric on his quest. But after Jevyan and the orcs chase Haldric across the ocean for the Ruby, Jessene starts suspecting that Elilmaldur-Rithrandil did it to lure the orcs away from his forest, not unlike why Haldric pretends he gave it to the elves: to get the orcs to attack the elves instead of the humans.
• Awesome Music:
  • Good lord, Over the Northern Mountains, one of the rarest and criminally underused songs in the game.
  • In fact, a huge portion of the game's soundtrack. This can be expected with compositions with a highly emphatic rhythm like The Dangerous Symphony, but even things like the calmer portions of The King Is Dead or Breaking the Chains can worm their way into your head and come back at unexpected moments (when you haven't played the game for days or years).
• Awesome Video Game Level: A Subterranean Struggle from Under the Burning Suns. For once, a battlefield actually feels like The War Sequence.
• Broken Base: Time and time again, many users find themselves debating whether or not Wesnoth's RNG is too varied for its own good or not. It doesn't help that the devs themselves adamantly state that the lower hit rates are to make each turn vary in strategies used, but many find this a weak argument stating that it instead comes to the annoyance that anything they plan has a higher chance of not working than working. Moreover, another stance is "what use is planning anything when it won't work anyway?" This resorts in newer and casual players spamming units and doing whatever the Random Number God decides works at best and dropping interest in the game at worst
• Cliché Storm: Most of the campaigns, being set in a traditional Tolkienesque setting. There are a few exceptions however.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Many of the Level 3 and above units, but the literal Giant Spider takes the cake, having many hit points, a slowing distance attack and a really powerful bite which inflicts poison to boot. The Giant Spider is so strong, it can kill Delfador within two turns if the player is unlucky.
  • Many Prestige Class enemy units can be this as well, and in that category special mention must go to one of Horseman's potential advancements, the Lancer. While largely useless for the player due to how in order to get them you have to hire, train, and then stunt the growth of an expensive and high-potential horseman, in the hands of an enemy who can recruit them directly they're absolute nightmares that almost no unit, no matter how high their level, is guaranteed to survive so much as a single round of combat with. Heir To The Throne's Test of the Clans scenario turns into a living hell thanks to these things.
  • Enemy leader units, especially mages, can completely obliterate one of your own units in a single turn if they get the chance. Because magical attacks have a high chance to hit regardless, and high level mages can deliver a huge amount of damage per attack, it's not uncommon for a powerful enemy mage to run up to an isolated unit and annihilate it and then run back to safety on their next turn, especially if they have their own units nearby to cover their flanks. It's generally a good idea to draw out the enemy's units from their castle (and maybe even sending a sacrificial Cannon Fodder unit up ahead) to make it harder for the enemy leader to hit and run. (Ancient) Liches are especially notorious in this regard, as taking them down in melee is much more difficult than other mages due to their Life Drain melee attack.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Elf Lord Kalenz. He initially appeared as the tritagonist in Heir to the Throne, before he was pushed down to tetartagonist due to Li'sar's growing importance in the story, especially after her Heel–Face Turn. Later, he became the protagonist of his own campaign, The Legend of Wesmere, which is so far the only mainline campaign to have a multiplayer version, and he also plays a significant role in Delfador's Memoirs. In addition, a minor update to The Tale of Two Brothers gives him a passing mention in the campaign's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, as he hires the protagonist, Arvith, as an escort. This makes him probably the only character to appear in four mainline campaigns.
  • Grogg the troll is a (theoretically) completely optional party member in Under the Burning Suns. Unlike the other optional party member, he is beloved enough by the fanbase that he even got his own spin-off campaign.
    • Trolls in general seem to be something of an Ensemble Darkrace. They're tough units with lots of hit points and powerful blunt attacks who can regenerate, but have better mobility than the Heavy Infanterists and Woses and don't share their vulnerability to fire (and cold). One wishes you could use them for once against those nasty skeletons. It probably helps that the game states that most of the time they serve in the Orcs' armies, because they simply don't know better.
  • Under the Burning Suns among the mainline campaigns, despite the fact that it is arguably the most difficult of the campaigns and completely out of context. Reasons for this include an intricate plot with interesting and well-written characters, fantastic scenarios that really demand tactical measures from the players and actually feel like a proper story instead of a string of skirmishes and a great setting that actually feels threatening. Yechnagoth is also frequently considered the best-written of all Big Bads.
• Game-Breaker: The multiplayer factions are mostly well balanced, so naturally when you try to add a new one, things are bound to be unbalanced early on. Enter Khalifate (the prototype version of Dunefolk). They could tear through the entire Drake faction with nothing but the basic Jundi and Rami; conversely, they got overwhelmed easily by the Loyalists' Spearmen and the Northerners' trolls. They seem to be less polarizing after the rework though.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Any highly evasive unit has elements of this, but the actual bats (high movement, high evasion, and draining attacks) fall solidly under this trope as fast, obnoxious, and deceptively hard to kill.
  • Saurian skirmishers/ambushers in any appreciable quantity are certainly this. Saurians are highly evasive in difficult terrain like forests and swamps, fast, ignore zones of control, have ranged and melee attacks that do more than tickle, and are cheap enough to recruit mobs of, at least for their faction. Fighting them, especially in some campaign scenarios where the AI can buy leveled versions of them directly, can be compared to juggling fetuses: slippery, unpleasant, and more likely to get blood everywhere than accomplish anything worthwhile.
  • Orcish Assassins also come to mind. The combination of high evasion in almost every terrain, multiple low-damage but poisoned ranged strikes in a single volley, and marksmanship on the attack so they can hit even other evasive units quite reliably makes them highly annoying and distracting, and even trying to deal with them via magical or marksman attacks in turn is a pain...because even if they finally do die to one of those they'll probably still have poisoned their vanquisher one last time first.
  • Ghosts have low health and damage, but also are fast in almost every terrain, highly resistant to physical damage, and heal themselves when they hit in melee. Without a good source of fire or arcane damage, killing them is infuriatingly slow. Their advancements are worse; Wraiths are similar except that they hit much harder, whereas Shadows lose their draining attack in exchange for the ability to become invisible at night and ignore Zones of Control, meaning there's no way to stop them slipping behind your lines and harassing your more vulnerable units.
• Obvious Judas: In Descent into Darkness, Darken Volk. His name is Darken, he convinces Malin that his village will welcome him back (even though he's a necromancer, whom the people of Wesnoth abhor) and disappears for a while on some unexplained business.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Some campaigns are notorious for having a particular scenario that gives you far fewer resources or a much harder objective out of nowhere, followed by a much more straightforward objective in the next. Northern Rebirth campaign is notorious for this.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Northerners sounds a lot like Blackrock and Roll from Warcraft 3. The similarities even start at around the same time (0:43 second mark).
• That One Level:
  • "The Elves Besieged" from Heir to the Throne, especially since it's the first level of the campaign. The objective is to get Konrad to northwestern corner of the map. Simple? Definitely not, as you are surrounded by no less than three orc armies, one of which is directly in your way to the objective, all three armies churn out level 2 (and even occasional level 3) units like there's no tomorrow, you have only just enough money to get 6 units, and while you have two allied armies, one is too far away to help much, and the other usually gets trashed in three or four turns thanks to Artificial Stupidity. As a cherry on top, the time limit on the map is very strict and is only just long enough to get Konrad to the objective if you start moving him from turn 1. Not an enjoyable map, this one, even with Delfador being around.
  • "Test of the Clans", the penultimate scenario of Heir to the Throne, is a brutal meat-grinder. The map is mostly open plains with few good defensive positions, and your enemies favour Horseman-line units who can easily outrun your troops and kill them in just a couple hits. You can expect heavy casualties, and if one of your vital units (especially Delfador) ends up exposed, you're history.
  • "Evacuation" from Eastern Invasion. You start out surrounded, and have to choose between getting your heroes to safety at the cost of most of your army or fighting three large groups of max-level trolls.
  • The final scenario of the Dead Waters campaign. Mainly because the three enemy bases never seem to run out of cash while you can barely hire two waves of troops to your aid.
  • "Lake Vrug" from The Eastern Invasion, where the map is designed to screw you over. If you take the obvious approach and look for the enemy keep by following the road, all you'll find is a decoy. The actual enemy base is located on the other side of a thick mountain range, meaning your foot units are slowed to a crawl and your mounted units have to be left behind. You're stuck dragging your army one or two hexes at a time across the mountains and hoping you can kill the enemy leader before you run out of turns. More recent versions tone down the sheer cruelty by turning the decoy keep into an objective of its own, but it's still a tough scenario.
  • "Costly Revenge" from Legend of Wesmere. Not only do you have to fight large numbers of saurians in their favoured terrain, you're saddled with two nasty handicaps (you don't have access to your Shaman-line units, and your troops destroy any villages they capture) leaving you with no good sources of healing.
  • "Towards the Caves" from The Sceptre of Fire surrounds you with a massive number of elves which you must get past. The trouble is that the encroaching elves and short turn limit don't give you much time to recruit and you have to escort your leader and another hero to two separate locations, forcing you to split your already-small army in two.
  • "Saving Inarix" from Son of the Black-Eye, at least if you want to complete the eponymous objective. Your saurians start out all the way across the map, where they're liable to be pinned down and killed before your main army can come to help; even if that doesn't happen, you're still hard-pressed to get them across the bridge with the short turn limit and hordes of elves and dwarves in the way. Of course, you can just blow up the bridge early and skip the whole level, but that means going without healers for the rest of the campaign.
  • "Settling Disputes" is obscenely hard even for a Northern Rebirth scenario, being stacked against the player in every way it can. You're stripped of your carried-over gold and up against an Ancient Lich who, depending on the difficulty, has anywhere from five to twenty times as much gold as you get. Your AI ally is a complete liability since you'll lose if he dies and he's prone to throwing away what few units he has in suicidal attacks. The turn limit is also painfully short, and may well force you to go on the offensive before you're ready.
• The Scrappy: The heroine of the fan-made, downloadable campaign "Love to Death". She even murders some lizardmen in cold blood only because they were worshiping a Death Goddess (but lacked the power of creating undead.)