Sid Meier’s Civilization V will be coming to the PC this fall, and with it comes a new Civilization experience. Civilization fans are used to expecting major changes each time a new iteration of the game is released, but this time the major overhaul is taking place in the combat system—the one place where the franchise has stagnated since the original game.

As veteran players know, every Civ game has allowed combat to follow the same essential trends and strategies, which go like this: Build up an army of units, which sit only as defense in your cities, unless you wish to attack someone—at which point it’s necessary to build a huge stack of units (sometimes: “stack of doom”) which move all together, space by space toward an enemy city. When they arrive, they must be thrown against whatever units are stacked in that city until the attacker’s stack or the defender’s stack is depleted. The winner is partly random, and partly dependent upon whose technology is higher, but the only way to have a good chance of successful attack is to have far overwhelming forces. As I said, this aspect of Civilization has remained since the beginning, making combat in the game difficult to really have fun with. Civ III attempted to deal with this problem by making military units prohibitively expensive, but all this did was make it more annoying, so that idea was dropped for Civ IV.

Finding a better fix for this issue was a major goal for the Civ V team, and they believe that they have found the answer. The new game will only allow players to place one military unit on each map space, and no units will ever be allowed to reside inside of the cities. Cities themselves will have a HP value which must be depleted before enemies can move in. Additionally, some units will have range attacks, which can safely fire—even over other units—while others can gain attack strength when supported by flanking units. Finally, the map spaces have been changed from squares to hexes, to stop units from exploiting diagonals to move between obstacles.

All of these changes mean that combat in the new game will be much more tactical, and the map spaces between cities become battlefields, the shape of which will be important to defense of the city.

Another new feature is that influence will now expand one hex at a time (rather than in big jumps), and these individual spaces can even be obtained through gold expenditure, rather than only through culture points.

The AI has also been improved. Each leader will now have a distinct personality and favorite strategies (as opposed to only three or four personalities for everyone). They will also recognize when they are failing, so that they may change strategy mid-game. For example: Napoleon’s favorite strategy is to overwhelm his opponents with massive foot-armies. If, however, those armies fail too much (or if the opponent is impractical to attack), he will choose to switch his focus to the space race. Perhaps he may even pursue a diplomatic victory, choosing which one seems most likely to allow him to win. This makes the AI more like a human player , and less like an AI drone.

There are also many detail improvements, like an easy to navigate tech tree and multiple graphical tile-sets, so that each continent in a random world can have a distinctive look.

Not many other details have been announced (for instance, the only thing that we’ve been told about multi-player is that it will have full Steamworks integration), but it’s clear to see that a lot of work is going into it, and it’s shaping up to be the best Civilization game yet.

Icrontic Viewpoint:

Rob Updegrove:

Civilization was a defining game for my development as a gamer. I fondly remember the sense of discovery I felt every time I began a new game in the early years of the series. Sadly, that feeling began to wane beginning with Civilization 3. I didn’t really feel that Civ 3 or 4 had anything really compelling to show that the series was anything other than more of the same with better graphics.

Civ 5 is going to change that for me. As the Icrontic team sat for the Cilivization 5 demo in the 2K games theater at E3 2010, I felt that sense of wonder and discovery return.

The first time I ever sat down to play the first Civilization, I never opened the instruction manual. Not realizing that units could stack or that multiple units could fortify a city, I laid out my armies in strong strategic defensive positions around my cities, one unit per tile. My civlization was quickly taken apart by the computer players, as they plowed through my forces and easily into my cities with their stacks of doom.

Civilization 5 is going to allow me to play the game the way I’ve always wanted to play it. The combination of the hex tiles and one unit per tile rules are going to open up a new world of strategic capabilities during battle. As the demonstrator said, the difference is truly night and day.

Bobby Miller:

To me, Civilization V was one of the best of show games. I didn’t even see it coming. It took me by complete surprise. I’ve always adored the Civilization series, and I knew Civ V would be fantastic, but I wasn’t prepared for just how good it was shaping up to be.

Changing the tileset to a hex-based system, rather than square based, is literally going to change everything. Movement on the maps looks significantly more natural now, and it improves the strategy of combat. No longer will players need to push diagonally across the world to maximize movement while going directly East or West. This is a change that Civiliazation has needed for a very long time.

Speaking of combat, I am positively thrilled that they have removed unit stacking. The age old “Stack of Doom” was always a dumb combat mechanic to me. The new system will make players think differently when they attack or defend, and that to me is single handedly one of the most important overhauls in the new game.

Finally, I am thrilled that Firaxis is dishing out a new, custom built graphics engine for Civ V. The map itself is much more detailed than it has been in the previous incarnations. Locations differ as new continents are discovered, which makes the entire map more believable. The leaders themselves look fantastic, as we were assured that DirectX 11 was being used to the fullest extent to ensure top notch visuals.

Civilization V is going to be the end-all, be-all strategy game. I cannot wait to buy this game.