Getting a Domination victory in Civilization 6 is no easy feat. Not only does it mean battling and defeating every other nation on the map, you also have to manage the logistics of your own armies. City defenses need to be maintained. Troops, armored divisions, and reinforcements have to be shuffled across the hex-based landscape turn by weary turn – one of the biggest struggles is the sheer amount of repetitive micromanagement. In Civilization 7, however, this is all going to change. Firaxis has just revealed fresh details about the combat in its upcoming strategy giant, and it sounds like some of the most bothersome issues from Civ 6 – and the entire series, in fact – are finally remedied.
With the Civilization 7 release date getting nearer and nearer, we’ve already had information on the new leaders, as well as the changes to eras and Ages in the strategy game. Combat, however, is also being drastically overhauled for Civilization 7, in response to long-running problems with moving and managing individual units.
Let’s start by going back. In the older Civ games, you could place dozens of military units on single map tiles, creating what we affectionately called the ‘Stacks of Doom’ – squares or hexes that contained the lion’s share of your entire army. Civilization 5 introduced the ‘one unit per tile’ rule, which eliminated the stacks, but created a new problem whereby your soldiers would occupy and block great swathes of the map. Now we had the ‘Carpets of Doom.’
Civilization 7 is fixing this, and it all comes down to the new Commander units. When you have a Commander, you can pack all your units ‘onto’ that Commander unit, so they only occupy a single tile. Once packed, you only have to move the Commander, not every individual soldier.
When you get to where you want to go, you ‘unpack’ the Commander and all of your units spread out onto adjacent tiles. Essentially, you compile all your troops, tanks, and whatever else into a single unit, and then get them all out again once you’re in position. It gets rid of the stacks and the carpets, and means you can transport your armies to the frontline without having to click and move them all individually.
Especially in the late game, when you have perhaps hundreds of units, this will save a lot of time and mindless busywork. But there’s more. Commanders are now the only military unit that can be promoted and that can gain experience. They have multiple discipline trees and you can boost them in pursuit of different skills and buffs.
What this means is that rather than going around every individual military unit and promoting and upgrading them one by one, you just work on the Commander, and if the Commander is close to other units, its buffs and upgrades will apply to them automatically, similar to an area-of-effect buff in an MMO.
There are different Commanders for aerial, ground, and naval units. Firaxis game designer Brian Feldges shares the specific disciplines for ground-based army Commanders. ‘Bastion’ provides defensive bonuses, ‘Assault’ offers offensive enhancements, ‘Logistics’ lets you build larger armies, ‘Maneuver’ allows you to move quicker, and ‘Leadership’ delivers combat and other bonuses to the Commander unit itself.
If your military units are stacked onto a Commander, they will also automatically move faster than if you’re transporting them individually. And Commanders have another big benefit, especially useful if you get into a major battle. In the past, if you wanted to bring up reinforcements, it would mean building them and then – again – moving them up to the frontline turn by turn. With a Commander, you can issue the ‘reinforcements’ order, and newly built troops will come to the battlefield automatically, without you having to waste time and attention moving them yourself.
And that’s still not all. In previous Civilization games, you select your unit, you pick which enemy unit you want to attack, and the two briefly lock horns. You do damage, they do damage, and then, provided one unit wasn’t destroyed completely, you both return to your original starting positions, ready to do the same again next turn.
“A game journalist once likened combat in 4X games to a hilarious Monty Python sketch, where a man prances forward, slaps another man in the face with a fish, and prances back,” Feldges says. “I couldn’t help but laugh at the truth in that comparison. It was around that same time that our Units team asked whether we needed to have the unit stop fighting and move back to their hex at all. What if, even though the combat was already resolved in the game, we just allow the units to continue fighting until one of the units is destroyed or the game turn ends?”
This is what Firaxis calls “continuous combat.” Feldges explains that this allows for the introduction of proper flanking bonuses. Once two units are engaged in combat, they remain locked in that position, facing one another. Using another unit, you are now free to attack that enemy from the side or from the back, and score higher damage as a result.
As for city defense, Civilization 7 also introduces some sweeping changes. Urban districts can now be built around a city center, and also fortified with walls, wonders, and special military outposts. If you’re under siege, your opponent now has to break through and capture all of these urban districts before they can take the settlement wholesale – you have dozens of extra buffers between your enemy and losing your city. Of course, it also works in reverse, so if you’re laying siege to a rival nation, you’d better be prepared to conquer all the lesser districts before raising your flag over the main settlement.
These are gigantic changes to the core combat systems in Civilization, but they’re all designed to cut down on micromanagement and make battles and Domination victories feel more alive and urgent. We’ll see how they play out come February.
In the meantime, you might want to try some of the other best grand strategy games, or maybe get the latest Civilization 7 system requirements, so you know your rig is up to the task.
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