A new age dawns on a world that is yours for the taking. As you advance your empire through the ages, it is up to you to decide how to lead your people to glory. Will you achieve dominance by spreading your culture across the globe or improving industry to build the world’s greatest wonders? Will you become the world’s wealthiest nation, or its most technologically advanced? Or, will you become a true conqueror, using your military to bend other nations to your will and add more territory to your empire?

In our last preview, we examined how the Focus Bar mechanic shapes your strategy. Today, we will take a closer look at the military focus area and how you can use your armies to shape the world to your vision. Here's a closer look at combat and military stratagem in Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn!

Take Control

In Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn, two to four players become some of history’s most powerful leaders as they race to advance their empires through the ages and become the world’s dominant force. To achieve this, they must balance their resources, select areas of focus, and create stratagems that will lead them to victory. A key aspect of conquering the realm is placing the control tokens that indicate your influence over an area of the map. These are placed by resolving a culture focus card, like Drama and Poetry. But if you wish to maintain control over your nation, it is not enough to extend your nation. You must also defend it.

Resolving your military focus card enables you to either strengthen your defenses or perform attacks. Like every focus card in Civilization: A New Dawn, the effectiveness of your military card is dependent upon its slot on the focus bar when you resolve it: the higher the slot, the more powerful the resolution. The first way that you can use your military focus card is to strengthen your fortifications. When resolving the card, you may choose a number of your control tokens on the board, up to the number of the military card’s slot and flip them to their reinforced side. In other words, if your military focus card is in the second slot on your focus bar, you can reinforce up to two control tokens.

These reinforced areas are less vulnerable to attacks from rival nations and the roving bands of barbarians that wreak havoc on your empires. When you're defending against a foreign invader, a reinforced control token increases the combat value of its own space, as well as each adjacent friendly city and control token, making it much more difficult for an enemy to lay siege. When a barbarian tribe invades a space containing a reinforced control token, it instead returns to its original space and your control token is flipped to the unreinforced side. Your fortifications may be weakened, but your rule still stands.

Battle For Dominance

Beyond defending your empire, you may use your military focus card to perform attacks to defeat barbarians, conquer city-states, and capture rival territory. To execute an attack, you simply select a space to attack from and a target. Your target must be within the number of spaces from a friendly space indicated on your military focus card—but this range may increase as you acquire more advanced versions of the military focus card and increase your military’s strength. In this instance, Iron Working is a level two card, which allows you to make up to two attacks within three spaces of a friendly space.

Once you have selected an opponent as the target of your attack, both you and the defender roll a die to determine your respective combat values. For the attacker, your combat value is equal to your roll plus the number of your military focus card’s slot in the focus bar, as well as any boons or modifiers on your leader sheet. For example, if you embody the leader of Scythia, Tomyris, you may increase your combat value by three when attacking or defending in a grassland or hill space. Meanwhile, the defender’s combat value is their roll result plus a bonus for which aspect of their empire is under threat. An area that is under an empire’s control, but has no cities filled with people will prove easier to conquer than a city-state with mighty walls and a well-stocked armory.

After each side has determined combat values, they may call for aid. Trade tokens can be placed on your focus cards by your caravans, and by spending any trade tokens from your military focus card, you can increase your combat value. From here, the end is simple. The battle commences and the leader with the higher combat value wins. If the defender earns a definitive victory or manages to draw a stalemate, nothing happens. Their territory stands and their fallen foes must retreat to live another day.

If, however, your attacking force is victorious, you resolve an effect based on the target you have conquered. If the defender is an enemy control token, you may replace it with one of your own and claim any natural wonder tokens in the territory. For a city-state, you claim the city-state’s token for your own and place one of your own cities in the city-state's place. If the space is held by a non-capital city, you replace your opponent’s city with one of your own. Finally, if you overtake your opponent’s capital city, you may take up to two trade tokens from the defending player’s focus cards and use them for your own devices.

The Plan In Action

Now that we’ve covered the mechanics of military focus, let’s put these strategies into practice. In this example, the red player is attacking the blue player’s reinforced control token, here highlighted in red, from their city in the northeastern forest. The red player attacks the blue player’s control token on the nearby forest by resolving the Iron Working military focus card, which is in the third slot of their focus bar. On their die roll, the red player rolls a five. By adding this to the slot number of their military card and the one point bonus from Iron Working, their combat value is eight.

On their die roll, the defending blue player rolls a three. They add this to the level three terrain difficulty for the forest, the one for the token’s reinforcement, and two for the number of adjacent reinforced tokens. This makes their defending combat value nine.

To shift the balance in their favor, the red player spends two trade tokens from their military card. This gives them a final combat value of ten, securing their victory over the blue player’s space. They may now replace the highlighted control token with an unreinforced control token of their own, spreading their influence into the blue player’s territory and putting them in a stronger strategic position to lay siege to the blue player’s city, if the red player can maintain their hold on their newly claimed territory.

Impose Your Rule

Assemble your forces. Conquer the globe with martial might and ensure your empire’s rule throughout the ages!