Very fine mix of strategy and rt-time action. Nice movies which you hate after a while, because of endless loading-time
STRATEGY: choose your officers, equip them, move them around the battlefield as you wish
REAL-TIME ACTION: you control one of the officers (you don't have to, you can leave him do the action by himself), and I particularly like that you can switch the control to another officer anytime in the course of a battle.
The story-movies are a fine piece of real-time rendering, very nicely done. In the battlefield sequences , the officers always wear the right stuff (the one you equipped them with).
On the bad side, a few things:
1. It's nice to see the movie sequences the first time you play the game. But you get to hate them, as there is no way around. They don't ever preload and you have to wait until they are loaded before you can cancel them. This is especially annoying with the councils of war sequences, you have two of them at the beginning and the end of each battle, in addition to any story sequences. You really get to hate them after a while. I would have wished to be able to get rid of them via the options menu.
2. The menüs are somewhat tiresome, especially the back and forth between the castle and the merchant, if you do some selling and buying.
3. I would have wished for more detailed information about some aspects of the game. For instance, I still don't understand how the weighting between the officer's skills and the troop skills influence the overall strength of a unit in battle.