SMS König was the lead ship of four dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial German Navy in 1911. The König class was a follow-up design to the Kaiser class and used a similar hull and armour layout, with the main difference being the centreline main turret arrangement as opposed to the staggered layout of the Kaiser class, intended to provide better firing angles.

As for König, she was laid down in October 1911 and commissioned on 10 August 1914. She, along with her sister ships, primarily served in the North Sea, with her most notable engagements being the Battle of Jutland from 31 May to 1 June 1916, during which she sustained significant damage, and the Battle of Moon Sound from 16 October to 3 November 1917, during which she crippled the Russian pre-dreadnought battleship Slava and forced her crew to scuttle the ship. At the end of the war, König was one of several German warships interned at Scapa Flow, and she was scuttled there along with the rest of the German fleet on 21 June 1919. Unlike the other scuttled ships that were subsequently recovered and scrapped, König still lies under Scapa Flow to this day due to the difficulty of salvaging her, and at one point her wreck was even listed for sale online until 2019.

Introduced in Update "Spearhead", SMS König was a natural evolution of her predecessor, SMS Kaiser, with centreline gun arrangements allowing all her guns to fire a full broadside. While König's internal machinery is well protected, her magazines are quite vulnerable to plunging shells that can penetrate her citadel with relative ease. As with any other Great War dreadnought, König is practically defenceless against enemy aircraft due to the lack of AA armament.