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Official Civilization 5 release date (September 21st for US or 24th for other countries) is still several days away. With 2K making the game manual available for download I couldn’t resist going through it and making this offtopic post. After all I’ve played all games in the series starting with Civilization 1 more than 20 years ago. Although I wish I had a playable to Civilization 5 Demo to base this article on, reading the manual will have to suffice for now. This article would be mostly interesting to people who played previous games in the series (or at least Civilization 4) as it will focus on the differences in the game mechanics. So here goes…

Civilization 5 System Requirements

Civilization V Combat Game Mechanics Review

The single most important change in Civilization 5 is elimination of the “stack-of-doom” tactic. It has been present in all games of the series starting with the original Civ I 20 years back all the way to Civ 4: Beyond the Sword. This tactic entails attacking or defending with a huge stack of same or different units all located in a single square. By the end of the game (and especially on large maps) these stacks grew quite large, slowed down the game and generally made it more enjoyable. While stack could be wiped out with a nuke it didn’t deter either human or computer players from abusing this tactic. Another attempt to kill S0D was attempted when artillery and bombers were allowed to deal collateral damage to a limited amount of units located on the same tile.

In Civilization 5 rules were dramatically changed – no two units of the same class can end a turn on the same tile. There are only two classes in the game: combat and non-combat units (settlers, workers and great people). Problem solved! To sweeten the deal many units were given ranged attack capability that lets them attack enemy units from a distance or 2 or sometimes even 3 times. Some units can even attack without a direct line of sight to the target as long as there is another unit within the line of sight of the enemy. When performing a ranged attack, attacking unit doesn’t suffer retaliatory damage.

To balance things even more, now you can’t stack defensive units behind your city walls either. Only one unit can be stationed within a city either as a garrison (adding to city combat strengths but not fighting on its own or engaging in the best defense by offense – attacking sieging units either ranged or melee. Cities themselves become units with health bars and combat strengths. Once city’s health bar is reduced to zero – the city is captured. Cities start with twice the health of regular military unit and heal every turn. They also get additional defensive bonuses which can be enhanced even more by constructing certain buildings. Overall I rate this change as good. This eliminates the annoying need to build defenders in every city (now every city can defend itself rather well right after it is founded long enough for reinforcements to arrive).

Stacking requirement is enforced at the end of turn. So units are allowed to pass one another but can’t end turn on the same tile. You will not be allowed to end the turn until this condition is satisfied. So suppose you just finished building a swordsman in a city that already has one garrisoned and all tiles within 2 tile radius are also occupied by your units that are out of moves. Your only option in such case would be to delete one of the units form the game.

Unless additional measures were taken however in Civilization 5 “stacks of doom” would have evolved into “walls of doom” with players flooding all tiles with endless stream of cannon fodder marching on enemy cities or on each other until the end of times. Besides unit upkeep cost, you are also limited by strategic resources that you control. While weaker or defensive units are not constrained, you can only build so many swordsmen if you control just one iron resource.

So the combat in Civilization 5 is much more about optimally positioning limited number of units to maximize benefits of terrain and formation. Here some highlights of combat game mechanics:

• Attacking unit gets 15% strength bonus for every ally adjacent to the enemy being attacked. So then attacking an enemy on a fully surrounded hexagonal tile you will get 75% bonus to attack. The funny thing seems to be that tank attacking another tank will still get 75% attack bonus even if the enemy tank is surrounded by 5 spearmen it could have otherwise easily smashed
• In certain situations your unit gets 15% additional strength if there is an allied unit adjacent to it (but not necessarily to the enemy unit)
• Units attacking from a hill get a bonus.
• There are separate artillery promotion lines for attacking units in the open (plains) or in the forest/jungle.
• Units have zone of control (ZOC). This means that when you try to sneak past your enemy by moving your unit from one tile adjacent to an enemy unit to another adjacent tile, you lose all your movement points and have to wait for the next turn to move further. Since the manual doesn’t mention any limitations to this rule it would be fair to assume that a spearman can halt an advancing tank column if for some reason tanks will chose not to attack him.
• Fights are not necessarily “to the death”. Both units can survive the combat just losing some health and returning to their original positions.
• All naval units are ranged so they can bombard each other without retaliation (although such attacks are less powerful than a direct attack)
• Interestingly enough the manual doesn’t mention any limit for air units within cities. If there is indeed no such limit one could mount almost unbreakable defense just by keeping a bomber “stack-of-doom” in the city that would bomb all attacking forces into oblivion.
• Great Generals no longer join units permanently but rather follow them on the battlefield as non-combat units providing combat bonuses to all units nearby. However as all non-combat units they are automatically destroyed if left unprotected or if protecting unit was destroyed. Since you can’t stack units there can only be one protector at any time.
• Citadels can be constructed by Great Generals. These provide massive defensive bonuses and deal significant damage to any enemy unit that ends its turn next to it.
• Transports are gone. Instead any ground unit can “embark” becoming (once appropriate tech is available) defenseless naval non-combat unit that is easily destroyed unless protected. This is not so if you are playing as Songhai Civilization – then your “embarked” units can defend themselves.

As I’ve mentioned before tiles gained two sides and changed from squares to hexagons. This results in a more natural distances between places and the fact that in Civilization 5 units can be attacked from 6 different directions rather than from 8.

Since a newly founded city can defend itself from the day it is founded this eliminates a rare but nasty scenario of one Civ being destroyed by another right at the start when their warrior is off exploring somewhere else.

Conclusion

Civilization 5 has definitely changed when compared to Civilization 4 Beyond the Sword. Many new concepts were added and many were removed. While I would wish that some things wouldn’t get removed, I’d rather have a simpler yet enjoyable game than another incarnation of “Master of Orion 3″ that became so complex that it was impossible to play.

Civilization 5 Trailer

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-y99pkS_Vs