Civ 7: War Strategy and Tactics

[Note: I haven’t written about Civ since March, and since then my subscriber count has increased by 400%. So…uh…just a heads up that all of you newer subscribers will also be getting very niche Civ 7 content in your inbox. Enjoy!]

I play a lot of multiplayer Civ — at this point, that's basically the only way I play the game. Multiplayer is really a completely different beast from single player, because, well, war. When you are playing against opponents who will wage war intelligently, almost every aspect of the game changes. You need to be more cautious about your enemies and your allies (because, in practice, everyone is an enemy for life and an ally of convenience). You need to rethink your military investment and your strategic positioning. You may revalue and prioritize different wonders or civics or techs. In multiplayer games, war is the backbone of civ.

In Civ 6, none of my games ended in a military victory. Yea, sure, there was a lot of war. Like, a ton of war. But almost every game ended in some other victory condition. Most often it was a nail biter science victory. There would be a war raging in the background, but that was basically going on to try to prevent the science victory.

By contrast, in Civ 7, almost every one of my games has ended in a military victory. And the reason is pretty obvious: it is just way way easier to get the requisite 20 ideology points, than it is to capture every opponent's capital. Civ 7 basically forces you to play wide; even if you only have a few cities, you need a ton of settlements to earn legacy points. Even the science path, which rewards 'tall' gameplay, benefits from towns that feed your cities and give them extra pop. As a result, by the time the end game rolls around in Civ 7, there are tons of settlements all over the place. Most of them are small and poorly defended. Once you unlock an ideology, you only need to capture 10 of those settlements — even fewer if you happen to be conquering an opponent on a different ideological path. Besides being a much easier win condition to achieve than the rest, you can also 'save up for it' by building up your commanders and your troop counts from prior eras.

Given the importance of war, I want to spend the rest of this post going through a couple of long term strategic considerations and a few tactical gameplay elements that have influenced how I wage war in Civ 7.

Commanders

Commanders are the beating heart of the new war mechanics in Civ 7. They completely change how you think about war. Having high leveled commanders is crucial as the game goes on; the biggest downside of being a mostly peaceful civ is that you will have under-leveled commanders when push comes to shove in the end game.

First, the basics. Commanders are a civilian unit that enable rapid mobility and passive boosts for your units. There are three kinds of commander — army commanders, fleet commanders, and squadron commanders (Aircraft carriers and Aerodromes also act as commanders, but for now we can ignore them). In the early and mid game, army commanders are by far the most important. By the end of the exploration era and into the modern era, the importance of fleet commanders skyrockets until they are roughly on par with army commanders. By default, the only thing that commanders can do is "carry" units around, effectively giving slow units more movement speed. But as units fight near the commander, the commander will get more experience which in turn will enable powerful buffs on those units. There are two kinds of buffs — promotions and commendations. Promotions are further broken down into trees that represent specific kinds of buffs. For example, the "Bastion" army commander promotion tree is all about making unit defense stronger, while the "Bombardment" fleet commander promotion tree makes your navy better at attacking things on land. Commendations are extremely powerful boosts that are unlocked after you finish a promotion tree. For army commanders, you can get a commendation every 4 promotions; for other commanders, every 3.¹

The Army Commander promotion tree. I generally will go down one side of the red tree (Assault) first to get the commendation on the far right (Order, +5 combat strength for units in radius) as soon as possible.

Army commanders are the first major commander you unlock — you get a free one early in the ancient era with the Discipline civic. I cannot stress enough how important it is to get army commanders to level 4 on the assault tree with the Order commendation before your first major war. An army at full health gets a whopping +12-13 damage bonus just from being in the radius of a level 4 commander. That's +5 from the commendation, +5 from the Advancement promotion, and +2-3 from the other promotions. I will regularly go out of my way to take out one or two nearby city states, just to give my commanders more experience.

Combat bonuses are easy to understand and obviously quite strong, but I think the Initiative promotion is the most important army commander promotion. This promotion is the first on the assault tree — another reason to go red first. Initiative allows your general to "unit dance". You can move up to 4 units up to two tiles each with no movement cost for those units. If you have a front line infantry unit that's taken a lot of damage, you can just move it to the back line while simultaneously bringing fresh units forward, and then have those fresh units attack on the same turn. The game imposes pretty large penalties for damaged units; with clever unit dancing, you can tactically ensure that those penalties only apply to your enemies.

Note that the warriors both have full movement — none of their actions have been used up by packing into and out of the commander. This means the now-frontline warrior can attack immediately, while the backline warrior can immediately start healing.

The same ability lets you move ranged and siege units into place while ignoring terrain movement penalties. For example, you can move a catapult from out of range to the front line on top of a hill, and have it fire on the same turn, using the same 'swap' ability as above. And it let's you move your units across rough terrain or rivers without them incurring any movement penalties themselves.

In any Civ war, you are fundamentally limited by the number of units that can directly attack an opponent. I call this the "effective army size." You may have an army that is 4 times larger than your opponent; it doesn't matter if they can defend a choke point where only one of your units can attack at a time, and the rest are just hanging back waiting for their turn. Your effective army size is just one unit. The Initiative promotion allows you to dramatically increase your "effective army size", by ensuring that you always have ranged, siege, and infantry in the right place.

Initiative also makes packing units into your commander really useful. You can keep a reserve of units that effectively live on your front line, ready to pop out as soon as they are needed. If you time things right, you can use the "reinforce" ability to have a steady stream of units coming from your major cities straight to the front lines of whatever war you're waging.

The last thing to note is that army commanders count as civilian units, which means they can cross oceans as soon as you unlock cartography in the Exploration age. This allows you to effectively set up a military forward base extremely early, which in turn can help you rush wars in the distant lands.

I don't have as much to add (yet!) about fleet and squadron commanders, except to say that you should basically always be taking promotions that increase your units offensive or defensive capabilities (i.e. the red and green skill trees).

Military Composition

In many strategy games, the developers want to give the players choice and reward careful intelligence gathering. Also, they want to make a bunch of fun little units that players will use. If any one unit or class of units is too powerful, though, players will just not build anything else. This is less fun for everyone involved.

Normally, to get around this, developers will implement a mechanic known as RPS — rock/paper/scissors. Traditionally, cavalry are strong against ranged, which is strong against infantry, which is strong against cavalry. Civ 6 was basically structured this way, with a few additional wrinkles for siege and a distinction between melee units (eg warriors, man-at-arms) vs anti-cav units (eg spearmen, pikemen).

Civ 7 basically gets rid of RPS. Land units all have a built in strength. While there are many ways to modify that strength — resources like iron, fortifications, and of course commanders — as far as I can tell there are no direct combat bonuses for one kind of guy whacking a different kind of guy.

Many have criticized this aspect of the game, arguing that you basically only ever ought to build cavalry. I think this goes too far — ranged and siege are absolutely still valuable, since they can dish out damage without taking any in turn (and do extra damage against units in the water — more on this shortly). But it is kind of true that once cavalry is unlocked, you really shouldn't be building any infantry.

In lieu of a standard infantry/cavalry/ranged RPS, the real strategic choice lies in your domain composition. That is, land, sea, and air. The game absolutely shines here. You need a strong composition of all three by the modern era. But even in the ancient era, naval units play a big role thanks to the importance of settling on coasts or on navigable rivers.² In Civ 6, I would basically never build naval units unless I was explicitly on an ocean-themed map. In Civ 7, I'm building naval units every game.

Ships don't directly get bonuses against land units or vice versa.³ You don't build ships because they are strong against cavalry, or whatever — that's not how Civ 7 works. Instead, the strategic variance of your military composition comes from geography. Are you attacking a city on a river or coast, or one that is way inland? Do you need to ferry and protect land units across the water? Does your opponent have a strong navy and a weak army, or a strong army and a weak navy?

A real scenario that happened in a game against my wife, Mia. The geography forced us to build and deploy militaries that had a mix of land and sea. I was able to hold two chokepoints, limiting Mia’s effective army size. Meanwhile, Mia’s lack of siege prevented her from taking out my boats. I ended up taking the settlement.

Even late game planes are not catch-all war winners. Planes can't easily get to far away settlements that are out of range. That means you either have to have a nearby city with an Aerodrome, or a squadron commander that can act as a stop over point, or an aircraft carrier. In one game I had to construct a multi-hop path from my main cities to islands to distant lands, just so I could effectively bring my planes into position.

Besides feeling more like actual real world strategy (because, let's be real, RPS is cute but not really accurate), the tactical depth feels very large. And there is so much synergy with the rest of the game. The incentive to build a sprawling empire across oceans works really well with the game's war mechanics, because you will basically always have multi-front wars that span land, air, and sea.

On the whole, I don't mind that infantry isn't all that useful — I barely notice, because I've basically stopped thinking in terms of individual units by the time the exploration era gets going. I think this is a bold direction for Civ, and I think they executed on this very well.

Diplomacy and War Weariness

I'm a huge fan of diplomacy in Civ 7. Influence points are an extremely valuable resource that are used in a lot of zero-sum ways. You can spend influence on befriending city states, espionage, projects, and of course, war support. But, critically, you are unlikely to have enough influence for everything. Like any good strategy game, Civ 7 makes you choose.

I think influence may be one of the stronger resources in the game, and is critical to hoard for war. Having negative war support is absolutely brutal. Every negative point of war support leads to -3 to -7 happiness in your settlements (depending on who originally created the settlement), in addition to the -1 combat strength. The negative happiness, in turn, results in -2% yield output per negative happiness point. If you have, say, -5 war support, that is -15 to -35 happiness, or -30% to -70% yields. Sustained negative war support is absolutely crippling. Importantly, you don't actually have to go to war to trigger the happiness penalties on your opponents. If you have the diplo points to spare, you can slow your opponents' settlements down without ever committing to an attack. And, finally, every time you take a city, your opponent gets a burst of diplo favor. Here, diplo acts as a soft rubberband against anyone who is trying a military steamroll.

All this means you need to go out of your way to pick up sources of war support to actually wage long wars. Like any good diplo system, this obviously encourages actual diplomacy with the other players in the game, each of whom can spend their own points to help you out. It also makes wonders like the Gate of All Nations, leader abilities from Tubman or Bolivar, or the first military attribute must haves. In many of my wars, I'll often go in with a +4 war support bonus stacked with a +3 military aid bonus from another civ. +7 combat strength is quite a bit.

This has rapidly become my favorite wonder.

The highest I've ever seen the war support go was +17. I was unfortunately on the receiving end of that particular bulldozer. One funny outcome of the war support system is as you fall behind on war support, you end up with negative influence points, which in turn means your opponents can slowly ratchet the war support against you higher and higher. If you don't have enough influence generation to get back to even, your opponent can functionally permanently cripple you by refusing to accept any peace deals. That's more or less what happened in that game — which, of course, I lost.⁴

The last thing I want to mention is that spying on your opponents' military commanders is a really underrated ability. Anyone who is playing to the legacy tracks is likely over-extended. Knowing where the commanders are will help you target undefended parts of other civs while concentrating your own forces in the places more likely to need protection.

Last thoughts

I really like civ 7's war mechanics. It's easily the best part of the game for me. It adds layers and layers of complexity to multiplayer civ. But war is just one part of an otherwise strong entry to the Civ franchise.

As I've played more of this game I've come to appreciate everything from the Civ switching to the era transitions, in large part because they all encourage dynamic gameplay that really flexes every part of the game, every game. I wage war, every game. I build a navy, every game. I hunt for extremely powerful build combos and synergies, every game. And I find new ways to creatively push the core mechanics, every game. In Civ 6, there were tons of mechanics that I just wouldn't touch at all in 95% of games I was playing! Religion was totally optional, Navy was totally optional, Diplomacy was totally optional. In contrast, I really feel like every part of Civ 7 is useful and worth deeply engaging with.

I know on certain forums Civ 7 has been slammed in reviews and feedback (looking at you r/civ). Some of these criticisms are valid. Parts of the game are artificially made more difficult by bad UI/UX, including things like identifying adjacency bonuses and city planning or identifying which policies will be maximally helpful. The modern age definitely needs to be rebalanced — c.f. what I said earlier about military being way too easy to win compared to the other tracks. And as I’ve mentioned before, it feels like there is an entire age missing.

Still, I have a lot of cognitive dissonance when people say Civ 7 is a bad game. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, civ allows for a lot of different play styles and maybe the single player experience is meaningfully worse than multiplayer. But consider this a vote in strong favor of the current changes and the direction of the franchise. I am a huge fan of Civ 7, I come out of every game I’ve played going “wow that was a great game”, and I hope the devs keep pushing forward in this new direction.

Bugs I would like fixed

[Adding this section to all of my Civ posts from here on out in case anyone at Firaxis is reading]

• There is a bug where, if I am allied with an AI, and a human player goes to war with that AI, I cannot join in the war. I get the “Ally is in War” notification that asks if I want to join, but no matter which option I click the game proceeds as if I declined the option to join the war and cancels my alliance. This makes multiplayer tough because it is easier for a human player to beat up on AI civs without being punished for doing so (since, if I were to declare war afterwards, I would have heavy war penalties).

• The game freezes up when several people are trying to do moves at the same time. During war, the way this manifests is one player can get all of their moves in immediately before the other player gets a chance to go; whoever triggers the first action gets all of the rest. Unfortunately, with units that do splash damage like the HMS Revenge or any naval unit with the Bombard promotion tree, the result is that an opponent’s entire navy/army can be totally wiped before they can react. This, more than anything, can make war feel really unfair.

PS: If you are still playing Civ VI, check out my guide:

1. Technically, you get a commendation when you finish a tree. So it’s every 4 promotions *if you go down a line*. That’s almost always the right thing to do, though.

2. An underappreciated aspect of the legacy path structures around distant lands is that they really incentivize players to build very strong cities with access to naval routes. That in turn increases the value of naval units as attack forces.

3. Though siege units use their much higher bombard strength against naval units! It's very valuable to have defensive catapults and mortars on your island cities!

4. My capital was almost entirely destroyed just from starvation, because the empire-wide happiness yields were so low that there wasn't enough food production.