Civilization V-An Improved Combat System

Although Civilization V received many good reviews from professional reviewing groups, popular reception was mixed. Many complained that changes to the game just left them clicking the end turn button repeatedly since there just wasn't much to do in a typical turn. Although I agree with many of those comments, one aspect of the game that I found much improved was the combat system.

The Major Changes
The single largest change is that you can no longer stack units together on the same hex. Every unit needs its own hex space. This changes the look of a major battle from this:


San Antonio is besieged by an entire army, from artillery to cavalry to infantry, all secure in one hex of jungle terrain.

To this:


Two sides face off in Civilization 5

Just from a glance at the game's main map, you can tell how much opposition you will be facing. In previous civilization games, a player can store an entire legion of troops in one hex that slowly advances toward your cities. In Civilization V, you see the entire horde spread out and can also easily tell what kind of units are attacking.

Another advantage of this system is that it requires players to think more about the terrain they are advancing through. In previous games it was easy to throw all your troops up on top of a mountain or another formidable defensive bastion, but now terrain with more marginal defensive benefits have to be considered as well. After all, only one unit can go up on the mountain or inside the city, the rest need to find a place to camp out as well.

The last major change is that certain units, such as archers and artillery, can fire at enemy soldiers from a distance rather than having to just directly attack like every other unit in the game. In the past, this ranged advantage was noted by making archers have defensive advantages or by allowing them to inflict some damage on attacking units before the random dice rolls began to play out. Now archers can pick off some enemy soldiers before they get in range to retaliate, a much more interesting system. Additionally, it requires a player using archers or artillery to protect them with melee units in front so that these valuable soldiers don't get slaughtered in close combat.

Why is this an improvement?
My biggest complaint with the combat systems in Civilization II-IV is that the defender received an overwhelming advantage at times. If an enemy is advancing, the solution is to garrison your towns and cities with every nearby unit, which apparently have no trouble housing or feeding the entire army of a nation, and it will be very difficult for the attacker to defeat them unless they brought a far superior number or quality of units along for the fight.


The entire population of Greece defends Athens.

Civilization II at least had a couple features that made it a little easier to take out a defending army. If you stacked units outside of a city or a fortress and you lost a defensive battle, the entire stack of units was destroyed. Additionally, when a unit defending a city lost a battle, the city lost one unit of population. This could even cause a city to be destroyed if it was reduced to a population of 1. Unfortunately, these were removed in Civilization III and IV.

The worst part for Civilization IV is that there are so many features that should add depth to the combat system. There are many units with bonuses against other units. For example, macemen gain a significant bonus in strength against other melee units like swordsmen and pikemen gain a significant bonus when fighting cavalry. There is also unit veterancy, which allows for units to gain bonuses to their basic combat abilities or to gain extra potency against the units they specialize in fighting. Unfortunately, these don't add a lot of depth to combat because of two problems. One is the ability to stack a limitless number of units on top of each other. The other is that when attacking a stack of units, the best defensive unit is always picked to defend. So, if you're attacking a archer and a knight with a pikemen and a horse archer, the archer will be chosen to defend against the pikemen and the knight against the horse archer. This means that you are guaranteed to lose either way when you attack.


Even Landsknecht in their snazzy uniforms have to follow those rules.

All of this isn't to say that winning a military victory was impossible in previous Civilization games, but it was only possible if your opponents didn't know what they were doing. All you have to do to survive an assault is spam units to defend your cities with and it becomes cost prohibitive to try and defeat an opponent in warfare. Although Civilization V was a step backward in many respects, the combat system certainly added a lot of depth and interest for me.