Dutch magazine "InsideGamer" writes about ships and maps sizes.

[MikeH]

It varies by map type.

IIRC for most of the maps it was 84*52 at standard, which is 4368 tiles.

ah, here we go. Reference.

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/reference/map_scripts_guide.php

[MikeH]

And significantly more were possible.

Apparently Huge was 100*64, 6400 tiles.

[Robert]

EDIT with UPDATE:

Some confusion spread after reading the 'map-size remark' in the recent InsideGamer Article.

Apolyton Civilization Site decided to phone Gerard van Nieuwenhuijzen, author of the article, and asked for clarification. He was kind enough to answer our questions.

Maps can certainly be larger then 2500 tiles!
The `2500 tiles` remark was given as an informal adlib by Jon Shafer to show that he was able to give a number in response to even the most detailed questions. This is in line with the informal setting of the article in general. So no reasons for us to panic yet!

Gerard was even able to confirm that maps will at least be the size of the civ4 general maps. At the end of our conversation he pointed us into the direction of another interesting source of information. Keep looking here for more! Thanks a lot to Gerard and InsideGamer.

[MikeH]

Excellent. Thank you.

[vulture]

I'm not bothered by the bombardment range personally. Civ has always involved a fair plasticity of scale. No-one is greatly bothered by the fact that in the early game it can take a century to travel the roads from one end of your nation to the other. Or the fact that almost all wars take hundreds of years, rather than the more plausible one or two. r that cities are regularly besieged for decades before being relieved.

The simple fact is that the scale of the development game is one thing, with so much land per tile and so many years per turn. And the scale of the combat game has always been radically different in terms of what the distance and time scale kind of represent.

The Civ V version just makes the spatial disparity in scale between the two 'games' more apparent. The combat isn't on the scale of the actual map; it is (much like in earlier versions) a 'separate' game that happens to have its tiles and turn superimposed on the nation building game, and hopes you don't look too closely at the way the two interact, because there has never been any kind of realism there.

[rah]

Yeah, everything is relative.
And yes I would expect 18 inch guns on a modern battleship to have significantly more range then ancient bowman. And one of my biggest complaints about IV was that those same battleships could never to any damage to land troops.

[ColdPhoenix]

Indeed. Navies were rather underpowered.

[Elok]

What's this business about auto-retreating from cities that are surrounded?

[Robert]

It's not "auto" but more "best choice".
I understood it to be like: "why leave an army in a city that's about to fall anyway?"

[Robert]

Locutus of WePlayCiv translated the entire article on WePlayCiv

[Kropotkin]

Support them with archers of their own. Use cavalry to clear the archers away.

Another interesting tactical challenge.

Perhaps you´re right. My first thought was that if you want to support it with a archers of my own I would want to place them behind the legion for protection, as there´s only room for one unit per hex, and they would thus not be able to fire back at the enemy archer. On the other hand, perhaps I´m unable to think outside the box. As I´m just starting to follow the development of Civ5 I´m still stuck in an old way of thinking. Perhaps, with fewer units, combat could affected by the units in the hexes around you, so that one unit could be ordered to support another unit. Or perhaps my fantasies about the perfect Civ is carrying me away.

[Sir Og]

The Civ V version just makes the spatial disparity in scale between the two 'games' more apparent. The combat isn't on the scale of the actual map; it is (much like in earlier versions) a 'separate' game that happens to have its tiles and turn superimposed on the nation building game, and hopes you don't look too closely at the way the two interact, because there has never been any kind of realism there.

That's my thinking as well. What we will see in civ5 is the tactical map placed on top of the strategic map. I can live with that and I can imagine the separate tactical battle and the strategic movement of armies, but my suspension of disbelief will be stretched thin if we start seeing archers firing against other archers on another continent. Of course I am sure that Firaxis have already thought about that and will address it.

[Boracks]

If I have railroad and artillery, can I develop Big Bertha?

At one unit per hex, I would think that you could develop combined arms type units, like a modern brigade has armour, infantry, artillery, engineer and support elements. The actual mix may be something to tweak.

[Ming]

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Other tactical war games deal with it pretty well, so I'm confident they will come up with a decent system to make it work. If not, I'm sure the entire community will rag them until they fix it with a patch