A few notes before I begin: CHATGPT DO MATH 
1.I will not be discussing the merits of 1UPT combat in this post. There's plenty of other threads for that.
2. The intro to this thread has been severely abbreviated because I lost all my notes listing every combat bonus in both of these games....consider yourself spared, but the point that now has to be taken much more on faith is that Civ V's were effectively quite ineffective compared to those of VI.
3. When I say "Combat Bonuses" in this thread, what I am referring to specifically are Bonuses that a player's Units receive that have nothing to do with their tactical position relative to other Units, or their own Promotions. So this means any Civ/Leader-specific stuff, Policies/Tenants, Religious Beliefs, Diplomatic Benefits, and Wonder Effects. Terrain Bonuses, Flanking/Support, Anti-Cav, Melee vs. Anti-Cav, Promotions, Great General/Admiral Effects will all be considered as "Tactical Bonuses", because as you'll see their prominence is outside the scope of this discussion.

Introduction: The Underdiscussed Difference in Civ V and VI's Combat

I've often noticed that discussions around the combat in the Civilization series has been very big picture, especially with the omnipresent 1vs.xUPT debate, and consequently the little differences can get lost. While Civ V and VI have very similar combat on the surface, I find that a lot of little differences between them have added up to a very substantial difference in how they play out. These smaller changes are numerous, the movement system, promotion trees, unit classes, resource system, effects of walls, power of cities, and much more changed between the final versions of these two games.

One change that happened quite quietly not exactly to the combat, but around it, was the prominence of Combat Bonuses. In Civilization V, Combat Bonuses were relatively insignificant, you needed to stack quite a few to make a meaningful difference in individual combat. Now, comparisons cannot be made directly, because these games calculate combat differently, with comparing the relative strengths of the units, and Civ VI only caring about the absolute difference in numbers. One really direct example is between Civ V's Just War and V's Crusade. Both are beliefs that boost your CS in enemy cities following your religion. V's Just War boosts CS by 20%, one of the larger individual bonuses in the game you can get against other Civs. Between equal units without any other Tactical factors however, this 20% difference would give a melee attacker an average damage of less that 33, with 30 being the default if both units are of equal strength. In comparison, VI's Crusade provides a CS boost of 10, which translates to an average damage of 40, with 30 once again being the "default." To achieve the same effect in V requires a difference of 50%, so we can say that VI's Crusade is 2.5x more effective than V's Just War. For further reference, I'm pretty sure the strongest Combat Bonus against other Civs you'll find in V is Clausewitz's Legacy, a Level 3 Ideological Tenant providing a WHOPPING....25% boost. So it's about half as effective as Crusade. Oh, and it only lasts for 50 turns. The very common +4 or 5 bonuses you'll find in VI are about as powerful as the strongest of V's individual bonuses, so it's fair to say VI made these much more central to how combat plays out. The question of this thread then, is how that has effected the game?

Decisive Attacks

One of the most obvious, and I would guess intentional, effects this has had is to make successful attacks much quicker and decisive. In Civ V any successful war against any kind of defense was a deliberate affair, with solid front lines slowly being eaten away by concentrated attacks, until eventually the defenders were picked off, and the city was whittled down. This can happen in Civ VI, but in singleplayer at least it's not how things usually go, and honestly if your wars take a long time it's a sign you prepped for them badly. Proper offenses in Civ VI are quick, with the invaders crushing each defender with ease, often wiping 3-4 units on a single turn, it's not uncommon for an AI's military score to be reduced to zero (or whatever their pathetic and ineffectual navy amounts to) within 5 turns of meeting their attackers. Walls can be a slog, but they can also be destroyed lightning fast with the right tools at any stage of the game. If it wasn't for the sluggish movement, cramped maps, and how binary playing against walls can be, I'd say Civ VI's combat is downright offensively oriented, because prepping an attack is incredibly rewarding when done correctly. I think this is probably intentional, it's hard not to come away from Civ V thinking combat should be faster, and Civ VI has an emphasis on letting individual player actions have larger effects (chopping, killing a Religious unit, stronger promotions, etc.)

Diminishment of Tactics

The decisiveness of attacks has come with what I see as a downside in Civ VI's combat model however, that being a de-emphasis on tactical positioning. While a defensive war in Civ VI might make extensive use of terrain to exploit movement rules, offensive wars tend to involve a concentrated and complete rush at enemy armies, with the Combat Bonuses making up for any tactical deficiencies. If I have a base +15 CS over my opponent, I don't need to care much about the small amount that rivers or forests are eating into that advantage. In Civ V combat would frequently involve multiple turns of back-and-forth over important positions, with positioning as many units as possible to be able to control key tiles being a core part of prosecuting a successful war. Advantage was often generated in little chunks at a time. In Civ VI a proper invasion moves from any given point quite quickly. Furthermore, masses of units are rarely necessary in Civ VI, while in Dom having more units to fight on more fronts is valuable, individual fronts can be easily handled by a handful of powerful units just running through an entire empire without real resistance. In Civ VI proper prep completely negates the tactical gameplay, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that. What is clear however, is that Combat Bonuses have made War Prep much more complex and involved than in Civilization V.

The Increasing Complexity of War Machines

In Civilization V prepping for an attack was a pretty straightforward affair, and really invasions only fell into two categories: 1. Tech Rushes. 2. Wars of momentum. The former involved diverging from the science path of the tech tree after a certain point to rush to a powerful military technology, meanwhile stockpiling gold and units that will promote into the unit you want to attack with. Then you upgrade them all on the turn you get the tech, and attack, hoping the technological advantage would shift combat sufficiently in your favor. In practice there was about one or two specific units each era that could be used for this, with some being much more flexible than others, and your civ was unlikely to add more than one unique timing. The second kind of invasion would usually occur after the first kind went very well, where a player decides to press their advantage further, and as they go on they get more economy and highly promoted units to back their aggression.

In Civilization VI, things are much more varied. The aforementioned Crusade is a common build-around tool for Dom, tech rushing still exists, players might exploit Giant's Causeway, policy cards and government types can play a key role, most war civs have widely applicable bonuses, etc. However, while sources of advantage are much more numerous, the player's goal is usually to stack a large number of them, so aggressive builds often rely on the Civ/Leader bonuses to distinguish themselves. Still, combat prep is a much more complicated and nuanced affair than in V, usually involving every element of your decision-making over many game layers for many turns, requisite with that effort it is much more rewarding. Overall I'd call it a total improvement in a vacuum. However, it's come with two side effects.

1. The weakening of the tech tree: Civ VI already made efforts to weaken Science through the civics tree, and it was a very overcentralizing mechanic in V. However, this decentralization has made comparing player's capacities at any given point much harder. While military score can tell you current military strength, and economy can give you some idea how fast it can increase, the effective military strength a player can wield if they use all their tools properly is quite hard to discern. It's also meant that developing a military often comes at less of a trade-off, because in V tech tree progression was much more clearly delineated between advancement and military power for much of the game. It can also be much harder to match a neighbor's strength if you feel them coming for you, because you might not have access to things like Crusade, or Taxis, etc. There's a lot of asymmetry in Civ VI, and while wars have always favored defenders, the predominance of Combat Bonuses heavily and inextricably benefits players who are planning on a war, in a way that often can't be replicated after the fact, or pivoted to if situations change.

2. Less "Quirky" Combat Bonuses: Civilization VI has leaned on giving players +CS as a military bonus for almost all big universal cases where the player must be rewarded with military power. A couple Wonders give you units or XP, but those are kept quite willfully niche. Some of the policy cards do different things, but they're also limited in what they can offer as players can freely switch between them. When I look at Civ V, it's hard not to notice how many of the universal Combat-Related Bonuses were not about boosting your power. The Honor tree gave culture on Barbarian Kills, and gold on kills after, not on a Civ Ability, but as something anyone could take. Alhambra gave a free promotion to every unit you produce....not enough XP to get an extra level, one instance of a particular basic promotion before any XP bonus is applied to the unit. The Great Wall gave your opponent a migraine. The Freedom Tree provided a bunch of free units. There seemed to be a much bigger emphasis on giving the player stuff to play with, rather than improving their numbers. Granted, one could look at any of these examples and see that V had a very difficult time balancing these bonuses (or anything else in the game for that matter), so it's easy to imagine why the straightforward number boosts were leaned on more for VI. The flipside of that however, is that the pre-eminence of these Combat Bonuses has made the more complicated bonuses less desirable, because direct power is very easy to access in large quantities. Players don't build the Venetian Arsenal to make ships efficiently, they build it to be silly.

As I close this thread I'll be clear, one can't really isolate a single part of the design of a game as large as Civ. While I've tied the predominance of Combat Bonuses to many effects here, it's important to note that they are rarely the sole culprit. For good or ill, each part of this game's design has to operate within the context of the rest, and so there are many causes to any small trend. That said, I wanted to narrow in on this distinction between V and VI, because I feel like so much talk has been made about whether or not 1UPT is good, relatively little attention has been paid to how it's implemented.
Like Reactions:newtociv6, Bonyduck Campersang, nzcamel and 3 others
Oberinspektor Derrick
Oberinspektor Derrick
King
JoinedAug 3, 2020
Messages621
May 11, 2023
#2
Very good summary on the difference in combat between V and VI, and I mostly agree with the points made.

I similarly think that the combat strength mechanic in VI allows for too much abuse, if the player knows how the system works and plays accordingly.
Case in point: My favourite early game rush on Deity does not revolve around a particular unit (like archer, horseman or swordsman rushes), but rather around Crusade.
This is because Crusade, when paired with Oligarchy, gives a whopping +14 combat strength to warriors, making them nearly as strong as unmodified Swordsmen.
And upgrading these Warriors to Swordsmen, similarly allows my Swordsmen to behave as if they were Men at Arms, or my Archers to behave as if they were Crossbowmen.
Add in a strong combat strength ability on top (Taxis, Gifts for the Tlatoani, Örtöö, King of the Eburones etc.), and you can abuse this system pretty hard.

Sometimes this is a good thing though, particularly on the defense.
For instance, I usually play coop with a friend of mine, and he does not properly understand how these combat bonuses work.
This gets him into all sorts of trouble on Deity, as the AI mows him down with superior units.
Whereas if you do play it properly, you can fortify that warrior of yours for two turns on a forest hill, making it able to outtrade a regular AI Swordsman once you factor in the silly amount of combat strength and healing this provides.
The AI can't really handle this, and it all boils down clever use of combat strength mechanics to allow the human to resist an early AI aggressor.


All in all I prefer the civ V system myself, with percentage based bonuses rather than absolute differences dictating a unit's power level.
It's also much more intuitive for most(?) players who don't properly understand or abuse the VI system, as a 20% damage increase to your units is much more intuitive to understand than a flat +4 combat strength value (whose value changes depending on the pre-existing sum of difference between the defender and attacker).