When the Warlords series of turn-based strategy games became popular in the early '90s, there was something novel about setting a fairly serious, heavily stats-driven conquest game in a world of swords and sorcery. In the decade since, there's been a profusion of strategy games that have borrowed fantasy trappings to decorate gameworlds of varying originality. The original Warlords games always focused less on story or flashy graphics than on strategic gameplay and risky combat between monstrous units. It's in this way that Warlords Battlecry II can be considered a true real-time heir to the series. It expands on the foundations of the original Warlords Battlecry with a dynamic campaign for conquest, even more playable factions than the original, a new titan unit type, and other gameplay intricacies. But the best part about this sequel is still the RPG-like hero development that so distinguished Warlords Battlecry from other real-time strategy games.

The undead and daemons make for interesting additions to the game.

The Warlords Battlecry games' unique feature is that they let you create and control a persistent hero character who gains experience from one battle to the next, specializing in one of many classes and gaining spells and skills in the process. The hero is the essential unit in every battle, not only because of its powerful combat and magical capabilities, but also because of its ability to capture resources, build structures, and give command bonuses to nearby troops. Heroes start out weak and can progress up to level 50, so there's quite a lot of work before heroes come into their own as a major force on the battlefield. If the hero dies, it's still possible to win a scenario or skirmish, though when you create a hero, you choose one of four modes that determine the penalty for dying, ranging from no penalty at all through experience penalties and permanent death.

While developing a hero is slow going at first, Warlords Battlecry II rewards patient character building. The good news is that heroes really are persistent. You can carry a hero over from the single-player campaign into skirmishes and even into open multiplayer games. The lure of gaining levels is a good motivator for pushing through the dynamic campaign, and you have a number of options when building a hero. From the second level, heroes specialize in one of four standard classes: warrior, priest, rogue, or wizard. From there, there are subclasses, each with particular abilities, including assassination skills and eight schools of magic. As you might expect from a game in the Dungeons & Dragons tradition, the race of your hero determines which class options are available. But the overall profusion of choices means that such restrictions actually just help clear out some of the lesser possibilities.

There are plenty of units to back a hero on the battlefield. The original Warlord Battlecry had nine playable factions, and the sequel adds three more to the mix. This isn't as overwhelming as it may seem, partly because some units are on more than one faction's unit list and, though the building art is unique to each race, structures are often analogous. The three types of elves--high elves, wood elves, and dark elves--are all particularly similar, and mostly differ by just one or two units. The barbarians and minotaurs also have some similarities.

Being able to build up a powerful hero will motivate you to keep fighting.

Most of the races are conventional fantasy archetypes and have a straightforward, combative style, but the game's developers were more imaginative with the evil races: undead, daemons, dark elves, and dark dwarves. For example, while the dark elves have plenty of standard elven units, their evil magic gives them units like spider queens, who lay eggs in the bodies of fallen foes that hatch into spiders. The undead and daemons have units with strong summoning skills, as the undead's necromancer raises skeletons from the dead and the daemon's summoners makes whip-wielding daemons appear. Higher-level heroes can also learn these and other summoning spells. Warlords Battlecry II has added one new unit type, the titan. Each race has one of these superunits at the top of the tech tree, and as befits their title, they're generally incredibly large and powerful. Still, though, the game's battles often involve so many units by the end that titans aren't impossible to stop.

The story-based campaign of the original Warlords Battlecry has been replaced by a dynamic campaign that details your quest to conquer the world of Etheria. Fortunately, you don't have to conquer all 67 regions in the world to win the campaign--47 will do. There isn't much strategy to the campaign level, as it mostly boils down to selecting a territory to conquer and then playing a skirmish against one or more computer opponents. These skirmishes mostly take place on prebuilt maps, but a few goal-based missions and some pitched battles that have building turned off add some variety. Also, at the start of some turns, there'll be special events, such as mercenaries who offer to join you in the next battle or enemy forces that invade one of your territories.