Romance of the Three Kingdoms II is a turn-based strategy games produced by Koei and based on the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Players choose from one of six scenarios that determine the initial layout of power in ancient China. The scenarios loosely depict allegiances and territories controlled by the warlords as according to the novel, although gameplay does not follow events in the novel after the game begins. After choosing the scenario, players determine which warlord(s) they will control. Custom characters may be inserted into territories unoccupied by other forces, as well. A total of 41 different provinces exist, as well as over 200 unique characters. Each character has many statistics, which range from 10 to 100 (the higher the better). A warlord's Intelligence, War Ability and Charm influence how successful he or she will be when performing certain tasks, such as dueling or increasing land value in a province. The player wins the game by conquering all territories in China. This is accomplished by being in control of every province on the map. The game includes a reputation system that affects the rate of officers' loyalties towards their lords, added treasures and special items that can increase an officer's stats and advisers can help their lords predict the chances of success in executing a plan. The game includes statistics galore for those who not only enjoys playing at the micro-level of managing all the individual characters and maximizing their abilities to do actions e.g. recruit other characters or going to war, but also a bigger picture when going to battle with other territories to be the ruler of China.

This is one of my all-time favorite games as it gives me the opportunity to think and plan at both the macro and micro level. It was played during a time when I had a lot of time to experiment and play computer games so I went quite deep into it, even creating spreadsheets to plan different scenarios and to help decide on utilizing which character out of hundreds to choose from. The game does take quite a while with 41 territories to conquer but the process to winning was simply an engaging process of numbers and planning!