The soldiers and the heroes (knights) that lead them gain experience by winning battles.  When the soldiers level up, you can increase their attack, defense, stamina, and willingness to fight.  They can also learn abilities, but they are limited compared to the ones available to the heroes. The heroes can gain and use various powers depending on their personality and religious views.  Some of the abilities they can learn are healing, magic resistance, rage, resurrect fallen soldiers, lightning and fire spells, and more.  Some abilities allow you to change the environment to more favorable conditions, including the ability to summon a fog to make it difficult for archers.  

All of this strategizing and excitement can easily be skipped by letting the computer decide the outcome using the auto battle button.  This feature is only available for non-storyline related battles.  If the odds are greatly in your favor this feature can save time, but if the enemy is close in strength you can probably salvage units by fighting the battles manually.  While the units can be replenished in your provinces, totally wiped out units lose all of the experience and upgrades that you put into them.

Fortunately, I don’t think hero units can be completely killed off.  The first King Arther had the ability to create multiple armies with hero units to complete the various objectives across the map.  That ability is missing in this game.  The storyline will grant you a couple of armies in due time, though.  To raise the loyalty of the army leaders, you can grant fiefs and offer them maidens to marry.  The maidens have various attribute modifiers that can add either positive or negative effects.  Most maidens have one bad attribute, but I did have a girl with no negative side effects.  I’m not sure if this is a glitch or was done on purpose, but one of the heroes available to you is a female and I was able to give her a maiden to marry.

Other moral issues include heavy magic use and necromancy.  In battle you can raise your troops from the dead.  If you do this often enough, you'll earn a Steam achievement for it.  The druids heavily use magic, and pentagrams are used to represent their magic abilities.  With wargame in the title, violence is a given, but it can be skipped most of the time by using the auto battle feature. I don’t recall seeing much blood and gore, but the text adventures go into gory details.  Lastly, some of the female character artwork shows off some cleavage.

The hand drawn artwork adds a nice touch to the text adventures.  The voice acting for the most part was fitting with the exception of the male voice actors doing the female roles as well.  Graphically, I found the overview of Britannia much prettier than the actual battle scenes.  The battle scenes seem bland in comparison to the rippling waters and sun beaming down across the land.  When starting a battle, you’ll see a flyby of all of the victory locations.  Once the battle starts, you can zoom in and out to see all of the detail and fighting going on.  You can see blades of grass or swarms of units attacking each other.  I don’t recall seeing any blood or bodies in battle.  The units themselves all look the same, but the movement animations look believable.  The knights for the most part are unique in appearance, and to keep track of them, they have a beam of light shining on them at all times.

My biggest complaint with this game is the stability.  As of this review I'm two battles from beating the game, but I cannot do so since one of the battles causes the game to stop responding every single time.  There are 32 bit and 64 bit executables for Direct X 9, 10, and 11.  I have tried them all with no success.  When King Arthur II first came out, I could not run it in 64 bit mode and that was because I had a corrupt Direct X 9 installation.  After I manually deleted my DX9 files and reinstalled it, the game ran for me.  The developers are still patching the game and as of this review are up to version 1.1.06.  I wish they would test out the patches a bit more since they have sometimes brought on new problems like missing textures.  

With these stability and moral issues in mind, I cannot recommend this game at this time.  I would wait for a sale or for more patches before buying this game.  That is, of course, if the magic, necromancy, or symbols do not bother you.