The Civ Legacy

I've been wanting to do some discussion of game design, and no better place to start than Civ.

Sid Meier's Civilization will always be remembered as a classic. You might say it is just Empire on steroids, or a translation of the board game - but millions of people don't play Empire and most have never heard of the board game.

Sid perfected "Just one more turn". Not only for Civ, but also in the less successful Alpha Centauri (lovingly known as SMAC).

The main advantage Civ had over Empire was splitting attack and defense (along with a more complex city model). This allowed specialization of units.

Civ also covered a much longer (and therefore more "epic") time scale.

The biggest failing of Civ was the old "phalanx beats tank" scenario. This comes from the simple unit progression (after the most basic unit - Militia 1/1):
Defensive

Phalanx	1	2
Musketeer	2	3
Rifleman	3	5
Mechanized Infantry	6	6

This is from memory, so I may be a little off. The general progression was just to add one or two to the attack and defense.

Offensive

Horseman	2	1
Legion	3	1
Chariot	4	1
Catapult	6	1
Cannon	9	1
Tank	10	5
Artillery	12	?

Sorry, I can't remember the artillery defense at all. It was less than the tank, making them very specialized (they could ignore city walls). Some of the offensive units could move at 2 (Tank may be 3, that has changed some in Civ, Civ 2, Civ 3, Civ 4).

The combat system was dead simple:

Chance of win = attack / (attack + defense)

So, a horseman attacking a phalanx has a 50% chance of winning. Of course, as a military option, a 50% chance isn't very attractive. I'm going to need an equal number of attackers as defenders, and defenders get an advantage for terrain and digging in ("fortifying").

I will cover naval combat in another post.

This is actually very easy to fix, although it didn't get fixed until Civ 4 (which, ironically, went back to a single strength number, although they did it very well).

Make the units improve by more than 1 per step! I mean, you've got at least a byte for strength and defense, that's 255 (or even 127 if signed).
In Civ 4, the "Modern Armor" unit is, like, strength 40. Plenty of firepower to crush that old phalanx.