Military and Combat

Building Units

In comparison with some of the other mechanics of this game, the military and combat has not changed as much. Land units can be produced in any city, but if you want veteran units you should build an Encampment district. Naval units can be built in an Coastal city, or in any city with a Harbor. So both land units and naval units can be built in cities without specialty districts, the districts only help make better units. But Air units require you to first build an Aerodrome district before you can build the airplanes. Building units in the appropriate specialty districts gives the more Hit Points (HP), they accumulate Experience Points (XP) more quickly, and they earn more promotions. And in some cases building a unit may require that you have specific resources available. An early example is Iron. You can find this resource fairly early, typically in Hills, and you need it to create Swordsman units, an early powerful Melee unit in the Classical Era. And it takes more Iron, and some Gold, to upgrade them to Men-at-Arms, a powerful Medieval unit. What you will usually experience, as soon as you find Iron, is that all of the other players will hit you with trade requests to get some or all of your Iron. If you are in short supply, refuse those trade requests, but if you have a lot of Iron and the player is not on your border it might pay off if the trade offer is decent. And units can also be purchased with Gold, and if you have the Theocracy government they can be purchased with Faith.

Types of Units

There is a complete list of Units on the Civilization Wiki site. There are a lot of them, with lots of detail about each, so I won’t repeat all of that here. You should consult the list. Land units basically break down into Melee units, Cavalry Units, and Ranged units. Melee units engage in hand-to-hand combat. Examples include Warriors, Spearmen, Swordsmen, and so on. Over time the units available improve, so you can get Pikemen and Men-at-Arms in the mid-game, and Riflemen and Infantry later. Cavalry start out as Horsemen and Heavy Chariots, then Knights in the mid-game, and Tanks and Helicopters later. Range units start out as Slingers and Archers, then Crossbowmen in the mid-game, and Cannons and Machine Guns later. You can upgrade units to a better unit, but only within its category. So if you have a Warrior, you can spend Gold and Iron to upgrade it to a Swordsman. Later you can upgrade it to a Man-at-Arms. But cannot upgrade a Swordsman to a Knight, that is on a different path entirely. And within the Melee units, some are specialized for defense against Cavalry units. These include Spearmen, Pikemen, and Anti-Tank units. As a general rule when you are putting a unit in the City Center as a Garrison unit, you should choose one of these as Cavalry are some of the best offensive units for capturing cities.

Unit Statistics

Each unit is defined by certain statistics. These include Hit Points which determine how much damage they have sustained, Combat Strength which detrmines how much damage they can deal out in combat. and Movement, which determines how fast they can move. Hit Points work the same for all units. Every unit starts out with 100 Hit Points, but lose some amount after a combat. Generally this will only be a partial loss for both combatants. After one player initiates combat on their turn, the other player will have a chance to respond on their turn. They can attack back, or they can attempt to withdraw. You can see a measure of each units remaining hit points by looking an arc on the left of the unit. If the unit has all of their hit points (100) there is nothing to see. If they lose a few, the arc will be green, lose some more and it will be yellow, and if hits red the unit is close to dying. Once the hit points reach 0 the unit is dead.

Combat Strength determines how many hit points each unit loses. There is a random dice roll element to this, but in general a unit with a higher Combat Strength will lose fewer hit points. But because of the random element it will occasionally go the other way. And Movement determines how many tiles a unit can travel through in a turn, allowing for modifiers like Terrain. As an example of these statistics, you start out with a Warrior unit as soon as you begin the game. This unit has a Combat Strength of 20, and a Movement of 2. The Swordsman, the next level Melee unit, also has a movement of 2 (both units move on foot), but a Combat Strength of 35. So in general a Swordsman will defeat a Warrior, but with a lucky roll or two the Warrior could get victory. And if the Warrior is at full Hit Points, and the Swordsman is in the red on Hit Points, the Warrior could win.

Modifiers

There are a number of modifiers that can affect the combat strength of each unit. Modifiers can be either positive or negative. Examples include Terrain, Fortification, Promotions, and Lost Hit Points. Terrain can give you a bonus if you are on Hills, Woods, or Rain Forest. But a penalty applies if you are on Marshes or Floodplains. Fortifying a unit gives you a +3 after one turn has elapsed, or +6 after 2 turns have elapsed. This means that if you Fortify your unit just before it gets attacked, you will get no bonus from it. And if you have a Garrison unit in your Gity Center and have set it to Fortified, you will usually have it sitting there for at least 2 or more turns before anyone tries to attack, so that is good. Promotions are important, and a unit that has accumulated enough XP will be offered the opportunity to take a promotion. Each type of unit has its own Promotion path that makes sense for that type of unit. The first promotion can come fairly easily, but the cost in terms of XP goes up with each promotion the unit gets. And while you can delay actually taking the promotion, you should note that the unit does not gain any additional XP until the promotion is applied. Finally when you lose Hit Points your Combat Strength will go down a little bit.

Pillaging

All military units have the abillity to pillage tiles, which wrecks any improvements on them. This can do significant damage to an opponent you are at war with. And it does not generate any additional grievances beyond the ones you have for being at war in the first place.

Combined Units

As in Civilization V, you can only have one unit per tile in general, so no more Death Stacks. But in Civilization VI they introduced an Escort option. With Settlers, you can have a military unit Escort the Settler unit. That becomes a movement option for the Military unit if it is adjacent to the Settler unit. In the early game particularly you might want to have a Warrior escort your Settler unit so it doesn’t get attacked by those pesky barbarians, or other players for that matter. And Light Cavalry units can achieve the Escort promotion.

But the big new option is that you can form Corps, Armies, Fleets, and Armadas in Civ 6. To do this, you need to research the appropriate Civics. When you have researched Nationalism, you will be able to form Corps and Fleets. These are combinations of 2 units of the same kind, and they get a bonus to their strength. And the resource cost per turn (typically something like Coal of Oil) is just the cost of one unit, so if you are resource constrained that can be handy. The Gold maintenance cost per turn is reduced to 75% of the combined cost of the two units, another nice bonus. When you have done this, your Corps or Fleets are in effect one more powerful unit. If you have gotten to this level, any time you have two of the same unit next to each other you will have an option to combine them.

You can also build them directly if you wish. They will take longer than one unit to build, but the total cost of building a Corps is less than the cost of building the two units. However, if you build the individual units in two different cities you can get your Corps or Fleet more quickly.

One you have researched the Mobilization Civic you can then create Armies and Armadas. These are similar except they consist of three units each instead of two. They get an even larger bonus strength, a larger reduction in Gold maintenance costs , and in terms of per-turn resource costs an Army or Armada only uses as much as one unit in terms of things like Coal and Oil.

Flanking Bonuses & Sieges

Having adjacent units of yours next to the one involved in combat gives you a Flanking or Support bonus. These are pretty similar, except flanking happens on attack and support happens on defense, but each adjacent unit that is also facing the enemy unit adds to your Combat Strength. There is a somewhat similar mechanism for attacking cities. Normally a city under attack will repair 20 points per turn, which can make it harder to capture unless you can amass a lot of firepower. But if you can exert a Zone of control over every surrounding tile to the city, the city will be under siege and cannot repair its hit points. This does not necessarily mean you need 6 surrounding units because some units may exert a Zone of Control over adjacent tiles. The rules are first, that a unit can only exert a zone of control in its domain, i.e. land units can only control land tiles and sea units can only control sea tiles. However, an embarked land unit can control the tile they occupy. Also, no land unit can exert a Zone of Control across a river. So if you are attacking a city that is on the coast and adjacent to a river (a very popular place for a city), you might actually need 6 units to place it under siege. However, if it is a city inland and not on a river, you might get away as few as 3 units.

Great Generals/Great Admirals

Great Generals are earned through the accumulation of Great General points, which can come from Encampments and developed buildings in them, through some Wonders, and the Strategos policy card. A Great General can accompany your military units and provide +5 Combat strength and +1 Movement to units within 2 tiles. They do not engage in combat directly, but make your units more powerful. They are very useful to have along on a siege or a miliatry campaign. Great Admirals are the corresponding Naval great person. They are earned through Great Admiral points, which come from Harbor districts and the improvements thereon, like Lighthouse, Shipyard, and Seaport. And they also provide +5 Combat strength and +1 movement to naval units with 2 tiles.

Both Great Generals and Great Admirals can also be used to get a beneft specific to the General or Admiral. That uses up the unit, however, so you need to consider your options. But it is worth noting that both Great Generals and Great Admirals come from specific Eras when they are earned, and they can only provide the bonuses to Combat Strength and Movement to units that are up to two Eras more advanced. That means there is a point where they should be retired, and you can then take their special benefit if it still useful.