Episode: 4530
Title: Playing Civilization V, Part 6
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4530/hpr4530.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:21 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4530, for 2025-12-12
Today's show is entitled, "Playing Civilization V, Part 6"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:12:39
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "We continue our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V."
Hello, this is a hookah. Welcome to you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
Inner ongoing series of computer strategy games and we're in the middle of discussing Civilization 5 and
Now I'm gonna get to one that probably a lot of people are gonna want to get into and that is
War and combat crushing your enemies
Making their women weep
All right, so how do you do that in this game?
Well, it's various ways of doing it, of course
And a lot of it depends on terrain and it's things like that. Let's start with land combat
Now
You are gonna have to fight in this game no matter how peaceful you may wish to be early on the barbarians will come after you
And they cannot be reasoned with you either kill them or they kill you. It's as simple as that
And then you may attract the greedy attention of other empires who want what you have
So you have to be ready and that means you have to build military units and learn how to use them effectively
There are three types of military units available in this game land sea and air and they take the stage in that order
When you start out you have a settler unit that can found your first city and a warrior unit
Now, I will generally use my warrior unit to explore for the first 20 or so turns because
Experience tells me that is safe
If it turns out to be a disaster, I'll just restart
And while I'm doing that, I will build at least one and often two scout units to take over the exploration
By turn 30, I've probably discovered a few barbarian encampments
Taking them out is a good idea because clearing them can yield a bit of cash
As long as encampments are left alone, they will turn out barbarian units that will harass you and anyone else in the area
If an encampment is near to a city state
You can earn some increased status with the city state by clearing it out
Now a warrior unit is the earliest military unit available in it is not particularly strong
You might want to be careful to not just charging and maybe lose it
If you can get archery and build an archer
You can stand outside the encampment and fire arrows inside to wipe out the inhabitants
But watch out that the encampment doesn't spawn another unit
The unit inside the encampment will not come out to attack very often
But a newly spawned unit will be outside and will attack
I like to bring a warrior in an archer together, so if anything happens, I have a little muscle to protect the archer
Now one of the big changes in syphive compared to previous versions is that you cannot stack military units together on a tile
This matters a lot for your strategy since each unit has to be on its own tile
This means you have to think about positioning of each unit
And that in turn means taking advantage of terrain features
If you refer back to our discussion of terrain features and I've put a link in the show notes to help with that
You can see that each type of terrain
And each terrain feature came with a defensive bonus
Looking at the terrain types
We see that grassland, plains and desert which are the main terrain types you will be on
All come with a defensive bonus of minus 33 percent
That means you are caught out in the open and therefore have a penalty tier defense
But many of the tiles will have a terrain feature added
Hills forest and jungle all have a defensive bonus of plus 25 percent
So if you are on a tile that is grassland plus forest you only suffer an 8 percent penalty on defense
Same with desert plus hills or plains plus jungle and so on
So if you think you may be attacked moving onto hills or into a forest is good
Also, it is worth noting that attacks across a river penalize the attacker with a 20 percent reduction in their attack strength
So learning how to use the terrain to your advantage is a key skill in combat operations
Now let's see how this works with a warrior the unit you have from the start
It has a combat strength of 8
So in the early game you might encounter a barbarian equivalent called the brute
But which is an identical unit otherwise and also has a combat strength of 8
If you meet each other on grassland tiles with no features you each have the same defensive penalty of minus 33 percent
So you're evenly matched
But the other factor is the health of each unit this is measured is hit points
And you can see the shown in a colored bar next to the unit
If you see no bar at all the unit has all of its hit points and is at a hundred percent health
If the bar is green and is lost a few points
If it's yellow you're starting to get into a danger zone
And if it's red it's very likely to be killed in any combat
So even if the combat strength is equal if one unit has a green bar and the other a red bar
There is an excellent chance that the unit with the red bar will be killed in any combat
Now you can recover your hit points for any unit just by resting it
resting in general recovers 10 percent per turn
But 20 percent per turn if it's in your territory and 25 percent if it's in one of your cities
Now there are other modifiers such as medics and faith healers that can add recovery
And heal your units even faster
Units can also earn promotions
These add to their abilities in various ways
There's a good chart of promotions at the civilization wiki site and I've put a link in the show notes for that
For melee units such as warriors the main ones would be shock which gives bonus an open terrain
Drill which gives a bonus in rough terrain like hills and forest and cover which gives a defensive bonus against ranged attacks such as archers
Now you're in promotions in combat
And if you have a unit that has a few promotions
It's generally a good idea to upgrade it to a new
Unit rather than delete it and build a newer unit because it keeps the promotions
Now you do this by using gold stuff grade the unit so don't neglect your treasury
The first ranged unit is the archer which you get by discovering the archery technology and an building one
They can attack up to two tiles away but they only have a combat strength of five
Now that means a warrior attacking an archer has an advantage
So you'll want to protect your archers
They're well suited to city defense since the city helps protect them and they can drop arrows on an attacker before it can hit the city in many cases
Otherwise it is a good idea to put your warriors on the front lines of combat and station the archers behind them
This is also how you attack cities early on
Use the warriors to absorb any attacks from the city while your archers drop arrows into the city from behind the warriors
Cities themselves also have hit points and you can see how they are being eroded by colored bars above the city using the same green yellow red standard
But note that once the defenses are down you need to use a melee unit to capture the city
Ranged units cannot make the final capture
As the game goes on your units will become better because you'll discover new technology
So instead of warriors you'll get to spearmen and then after spearmen you get to swordsmen and so on
But the principles don't change
Now it's the naval combat which is also fun
When you research the right technologies you'll discover ships and you can start using them in combat
Now the earliest vessels you will get are try reams
They have a combat strength of 10 but are vulnerable to ranged attacks
They can clear barbarians ships from your waters and are good for exploring the coastlines
But they cannot travel on ocean tiles which are a deeper blue than coastal tiles
They can attack cities and as a melee unit could actually capture them
But in practice this is rare since they would probably be bombarded in sunk
Still if you were in some odd circumstance where your archers had reduced the city defenses to nothing
And you had a try ream on the spot it would work
Later on you'll get caravel which is the first ocean going vessel and you should probably use them right away to
Explore the rest of the map as soon as you get them
And the reason that you want to do that is you're going to find other players
You're going to find other city states
You're going to find other
Natural one you know there's
All sorts of things you can do it once you've explored the map so never neglect that option
Now after the caravel you get a private tier which is a powerful ship that is not only good for
Rating coastal cities, but can actually capture enemy ships and add them to your fleet
There are also naval ranged units the first is the galley ass
Followed by the frigate the frigate is a powerful mid game unit
That they are ranged means they can stand off shore and bombarded units or cities on land
If you want a fun game with naval warfare try an archipelago map get your privateers and
frigates and go out and conquer
As with land units you can get promotions for naval vessels and there is a upgrade path as well
The try-ream can upgrade to a caravel which can upgrade to an ironclad
The galley ass can upgrade to a frigate which can upgrade to a battleship
Then there's air combat
This comes along late in the game obviously arriving in the modern era
Your two main unit types or fighters and bombers fighters are mostly for attacking other air units
They can do damage to ground units as well, but that's not really what they're suited to
The first fighter unit is the triplane
It is also useful as a reconnaissance unit since it can see six tiles in every direction
You can station them by a city and set them to intercept mode where they will respond to any air attacks from other players
The other major area unit is the bomber
The first of these is the great war bomber
It is designed to carry a load of bombs and can be very effective in reducing the defenses of a city
It is weaker on defense though
So a good strategy is to send in a few fighters first
Use up any of the city's anti air capabilities then follow up with the bombers
Now air units can also get promotions from combat and they also have hit points just like all other units
And they have an upgrade path
Try planes become fighters become jet fighters
Great war bomber becomes regular bomber become stealth bomber
So in conclusion
This is just a very brief introduction to combat in syphive
You could probably write an entire book on all of the strategies involved, but this will get you started on the basics of the combat system
Now civilization fanatics has a section called the syphive war academy
Where you can go in a much more depth if you really want to master combat and strategies and I have placed a link to that in the show notes
So this is hookah for hacker public radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support free software. Bye. Bye
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