Battle for Wesnoth (v1.4.5)

[posted 3/26/9, backdated to 10/21/8 because that's when I jotted down all the notes for the post, and I haven't played Wesnoth since then]

The Battle for Wesnoth is essentially a free, updated Warlords.  I loved the original Warlords in college (played a few all-night games when exams were done) and enjoyed Darklords Rising.  Wesnoth carries on the tradition beautifully.

The good:

• it's free
• the GUI is fairly intuitive so that you can get started playing pretty quickly, and it does an especially good job on things like clearly showing you where a selected unit can reach on the board, or when you don't have a unit selected, when you mouse over an enemy unit's square, you can see which squares are reachable by that unit.  /Extremely/ useful in many scenarios for timing your charge.

The somewhat frustrating:

• despite the intuitive interface, there's a lot to keep track of.  Every unit is individualized with two special traits; while this is kindof neat, it means that you need to remember, among members of the same type of unit, which guy is the "strong" one, which is the "fast" one, and so on.  Moreover, there are all sorts of other interactions, from the terrain you're standing on, to what time of day it is, to I have no idea what.  The time of day thing really kills because just when you start to get your units on a roll... oops, it's night time and now you have to regroup and wait out the night for a "safer" time to go on the attack.  All this is difficult to make intuitive in the GUI, so you have to go read the doc (boooooring!  and yes, I know, SPSS pays me to write documentation) which is not really complete in terms of understanding how certain things are calculated.
• Leveling up your characters should be fun, but it actually causes problems because you can get through the first few scenarios because you're smarter than the AI, but eventually you're overwhelmed by superior firepower because you didn't level your guys up enough, or bought the "wrong" improvements or the "wrong" guys. I actually think this was a major problem in Warlords campaigns, too.   This was a problem in Wizardry 8 (and Oblivion, too, and in all sorts of other games), actually, because certain areas are "leveled" to be challenging for your character level, but if you didn't maximize your character development, you were in trouble later.

The "I'm not so sure"

• I sortof like the turn limit on scenarios in Wesnoth.  There were a few scenarios in Warlords where the strategy was to simply hold against the first few waves of high-level enemy troops and then strike back at the mid-level troops.  Booooring.  A problem in Wesnoth is that your leader has to sit on his duff in your home base to recruit/recall, and if you haven't played the map before you don't necessarily know whether it's a map on which you need to do 1, 2, or more recruitments to get through the enemies, and generally you (a) run out of time if you guess too few and have to go back, or (b) might not have enough money going into the next scenario if you guess too many. Really, I feel like I need to go back to the start of the campaign and build up a few true "heroes" who go through the campaign with me.
• There's a delicate balance between finishing "too early" and not getting enough XP for your guys, and finishing "too late" and not having enough money to carry over because you don't get the early finish bonus.  Again, if you haven't played the map before, you can't really know what to do.