History YMMV / BattleForWesnoth

* TheScrappy: The heroine of the fan-made, downloadable campaign "Love to Death". [[spoiler: She even murders some lizardmen in cold blood only because they were worshiping a Death Goddess (but lacked the power of creating undead.)]]
* UnintentionallyUnwinnable: In the first scenario of ''The South Guard'', the game drops clear hints that you're supposed to meet Sir Gerrick before defeating the enemy leader. If you do manage to win the battle without finding him, later scenarios that depend on him become impossible.

* UnwinnableByInsanity: In the first scenario of ''The South Guard'', the game drops clear hints that you're supposed to meet Sir Gerrick before defeating the enemy leader. If you do manage to win the battle without finding him, later scenarios that depend on him become impossible.

** "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 [[SquishyWizardDelfador]]) ends up exposed, you're history.

** 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).

** 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.

** 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 land between 15 to 20 points of damage, it's not uncommon for a powerful enemy mage to run up to an isolated unit and annihilate it, especially if they have their own units nearby to cover their flanks.

* BrokenBase: 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 [[SturgeonsLaw anything they plan has a higher chance of not working than working]] or that what use is planning anything when it won't work anyway and instead resort to spamming whatever the RandomNumberGod wants.

* BrokenBase: 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 [[SturgeonsLaw anything they plan has a higher chance of not working than working]] and instead resort to spamming whatever the RandomNumberGod wants.

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: Good ''lord'', [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwKNBZ_KOvE Over the Northern Mountains]], one of the rarest and criminally underused songs in the game.

* EarWorm: 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).

* EvilIsSexy: Asheviere. The add-on ''Ooze Campaign'' even has a custom unit with Asheviere's sprite whose description is simply "[Character's name] is a pretty young woman with an unsettling fascination for death", pretty enough for a ''paladin'' to fall in love with her despite how evil she is.

* SchizophrenicDifficulty: Most campaigns have a fairly linear difficulty curve, but not all:
** Most notably ''Northern Rebirth'': The first four or so chapters are absurdly hard even on the easiest difficulty level, while the latter half of the campaign is pretty easy, just extremely annoying, because every single chapter throws a seemingly endless wave of orcs and trolls at you that take virtually forever to kill off. The [[ClicheStorm very generic plot and characters]] make it just even more trying to play through.
** ''Delfador's Memoirs'' is similarly bad, if for slightly different reasons: Unlike virtually every other campaign, it is completely impossible to plan ahead in this campaign, because you have no way of knowing what units you play with on the next map, since the chaotic plot of the game arbitrarily gives and takes units that you have to assume you only get to play with for a single chapter before they might be removed from your unit list again, only to show up in your recall list a couple dozen chapters later.

* AwesomeMusic: Good ''lord'', [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwKNBZ_KOvE Over the Northern Mountains]], one of the rarest and criminally underused songs in the game.

* ObviousJudas: [[spoiler:Darken Volk from the ''Descent into Darkness'' campaign. His name is [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast 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.]]

* ObviousJudas: [[spoiler:Darken Volk from the ''Descent into Darkness'' campaign. His name is [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast 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.]]

* JumpScare: Any unit that can turn invisible in certain circumstances can cause this and massive amounts of groaning as they ruin your strategies. While the most common scenarios are being ambushed by Woses in the forest or Shadows/Nightgaunts at night, or even worse, trying to take over an enemy town only to remember that a Fugitive had just stationed up in it far too late, some scenarios (such as "Crossroads" in ''Heir to the Throne'', "The Drowned Plains" in ''The Eastern Invasion'', and at least one optional quest in the add-on campaign ''Elvish Dynasty'') involve enemies with none of the abilities that grant invisibility being coded to ambush you as well. An army of skeletons could also invade an unsuspecting castle on an island from deep water (where they are invisible, but move ''very'' slowly). Thankfully, the AI (and most players) seem to deem the undead tactic too CrazyAwesome and impractical to use.

* EnsembleDarkhorse: The elf lord Kalenz probably qualifies. Initially, he appeared as a supporting (albeit important) character in ''Heir to the Throne''. 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 gets a significant role in ''Delfador's Memoirs''. This makes him probably the only character to appear in three (four if you count the multiplayer one individually) mainline campaigns.
** [[http://wiki.wesnoth.org/CampaignDialogue:TB1.9#Story_5 Version 1.9.5]] of ''The Tale Of Two Brothers'' has him mentioned. [[spoiler:The player character becomes his pay-for escort during the epilogue.]] That makes four if this version of the mainline campaign is committed into the release builds.

** ''Under the Burning Suns'' among the mainline campaigns, despite the fact that it is arguably [[NintendoHard 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. [[spoiler:[[EldritchAbomination Yechnagoth]]]] is also frequently considered the best-written of all {{BigBad}}s.

** "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.

* GameBreaker: Dwarves, arguably. They have lots of hit points, at least 10% resistance against ''any'' type of damage, hit hard with their weapons and the fact that they move slowly is balanced out by the fact that they have no moving penalties on most tiles and have the fastest moving unit in the game anyway (the Gryphon Rider). The basic Dwarven Fighter in particular, who possesses both a powerful slashing and a good blunt attack (and thus fares weakly against almost no other unit), is arguably one of the best units in the game, requiring only very little tactical skill to play effectively. However, this is arguably balanced out by the fact that Dwarves appear only very rarely as enemies in campaigns.
** The multiplayer factions are mostly well balanced, with the exception of the still-in-development Khalifate. They can tear through the entire Drake faction with nothing but the basic Jundi and Rami; conversely, they get overwhelmed easily by the Loyalists' Spearmen and the Northerners' trolls.

** ''Under the Burning Suns'' among the mainline campaigns, despite the fact that it is arguably [[NintendoHard the most difficult of the campaigns]] and completely out of context. Reasons for this include an intricate plot with interesting and well-written characters who repeatedly subvert MarySue tropes, 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. [[spoiler:[[EldritchAbomination Yechnagoth]]]] is also frequently considered the best-written of all {{BigBad}}s.

* TheScrappy: The [[MarySue heroine]] of the fan-made, downloadable campaign "Love to Death". [[spoiler: She even murders some lizardmen in cold blood only because they were worshiping a Death Goddess (but lacked the power of creating undead.)]]