To each their own
. I thought I hated luck in games until I played Wesnoth. It's just on such a different level than other games where luck features prominently, because you can DEAL with it.
If you looked at it awhile ago, I'd recommend checking it out in the near future. The stable version just went to the new 1.4 branch (the dev 1.5 branch already has some awesome features in it, but it's still kind of new) and new graphics are being done by some amazing~ new artists. Check out the elves/mages.
In terms of Northerners, that's really odd. Whelps have some pretty cool abilities like regeneration and their nice resistances, but they're slow, do low damage, and have lower defense than normal. The unit that is the most spammable in the game, some have suggested, is actually the -orcish grunt-. If you're playing against the AI, they don't understand how to deal with whelps with their regenerate as well, so they're quite powerful. A human player can take apart a mass of whelps fairly easily
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Yea, an army of Trolls is a whole nother story. They're level 2 though, so keep that in mind xD.