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I just saw another of these threads asking how do Civ 3 and CtP2 compare, and whether the latter would be of any interest to a player of the former, and so on. Now, seeing how this is probably the most common question asked by the newcomers to the CtP section, I feel the need to write a post in this subject, also given that I have played both games for a more than fair amount of time. The most important areas of inquiry seem to be whether the games are different enough, what the main differences are, and how enjoyable can CtP2 be. I’ll try to write the post mainly for those who have already played Civ 3.
For the starters, though, so that there’s no confusion, a few words need to be said on the history and background for each of these games.
Background
Civ 3 is developed by Firaxis , and is the official sequel in the original Civilization franchise. Civ 1 has been developed with many same team member as Civ 3, and so Civ 3, like it or not, is the current legacy. Civ 3 also is a Sid Meier game – while one can debate as to how much influence did Sid actually have in making the game, he is said to have decided on at least some things on the design, and, at any rate, it’s his company that developed Civ 3.
CtP2 is NOT a sequel to Civ 1 or Civ 2. It’s developed by Activision , a company that’s mainly known for publishing games, not making them. Activision has published such hits as Quake III or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, and will in the coming months also publish Doom III. At some point, though, Activision decided to make a civ-style game, which was originally called Civilization: Call to Power (often referred to as CtP1).
CtP1 had many original concepts that were different from Civ 2 (the latest civ game at that point), and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC). SMAC was in development at Firaxis at about the same time as CtP1 was worked on, but SMAC seemed to stick more with the Civ 2 formula, although it had a sci-fi setting and surely added many innovative things to the game. CtP1 aready introduced most of the concepts that are to be seen in CtP2, the main of which probably are stacked combat, public works and unconventional warfare, all explained in more detail below.
As CtP1 came out, though, things didn’t look too good. It received a lot of critcism from Civ oldtimers, mainly for being too original – unfortunately, many people couldn’t accept that this wasn’t just Civ 2 with new graphics, and they couldn’t accept the new concepts CtP1 brought forward. Also, Activision got sued for using the word Civilization in the name of their game, which is a trademark of MicroProse, and later Firaxis, and there were, apparently, arguments about CtP1 taking some other names from Civ franchise. Other areas of critcism for the game included a poorly done interface (it might have had some shortcomings, but it was quite easy to use, actually), and poor stability. Unfortunately, I have indeed encountered stability problems with the game, at least till the official patch.
Not long after that, Activision started working on Call to Power 2 – this time without the name Civilization in the title. CtP2 was supposed to fix the problems found in CtP1, while also adding a couple of new things. The interface was completely reworked, receiving a pretty beautiful style, although some of the things were arguably done better in CtP1 interface. Most unfortunately, the Activision administration decided to disband the development group, leaving the company to deal with publishing games. CtP2 wasn’t, therefore, regarded as a highly important project, and it was apparently rushed somewhat, and as a result, the game had some problems on release, the most notable of which were a very weak AI, big multiplayer problems (fixed in a patch somewhat), and lack of official PBEM, although PBEM was enabled afterwards. David Ray, one of the developers of CtP2, talks about Activision and making of CtP2 in his interview here at Apolyton, which could be of interest if you want to learn more about this game.
CtP2 didn’t make too many changes to CtP1, though the future victory was changed, the space layer was removed, and the diplomacy system was made much better. Also, supports for various mods is even better in CtP2.
Final words – let me say again, CtP2 has nothing to do with Civ 3 except for sharing the same core ideas that make up Civilization games as a genre. The development of these games took place under different circumstances, by different companies and by people who have never worked together.
The differences
While CtP2 has the same general idea that Civ 3 (and any civ game, to that extent), you must realize that CtP2 is a much different game. Note: if I say CtP at any point in this post, I mean the same CtP2, unless explicitly noted otherwise. The idea is indeed to build a mighty civilization as you start with very little, but there are many and many things that make these two games different. I’ll start with the two I would consider the most important, Public Works and Stack Combat.
Public Works: In civ 3, you use Workers to improve your land. Those are built and appear as regular units, and are issued orders to build mines, roads or whatever. The main downside of this system is that the game becomes much about worker management later in the game. In the Industrial age in civ 3, if you have a lot of land, you need, say, a hundred workers to keep it all efficient, and build railroads, and other improvements in newly conquered land. That would be fine, if only you didn’t have to move each of those 100 workers by hand each turn, and give them orders. Yes, there’s the automate function, but it doesn’t always work as you want it to, and will never give you optimal tile improvements. And even with your workers automated, you’ll spend a lot of time sitting at your screen doing nothing and just watching your workers leap around automatically.
In CtP2, field improvements are handled in a completely different way. You dedicate a certain percentage of your total production to go to public works. If you set that to 100%, your cities will not produce anything, and all your production will go to the public works. Now, these public works are what you use to improve your land. For instance, building a road costs 60 public works – normally. That figure will increase if you’re building a road through the forest, mountains or other unfavorable terrain. Generally, with the public works system, you need a lot of planning to make sure that you have enough public works to improve all your cities. But, you can’t just road every single square in your empire like in Civ 3, because going too much of public works will undermine your ability to build things in cities. Also, you can use public works to terraform land – that is, change the terrain type of tiles. Note that most terraforming requires you to have discovered the necessary technology, and consumes a lot of PW.
It has to be sad that many people, even those who normally don’t like CtP, have mentioned the public works system as generally superior. It requires more strategic thinking than workers, and has absolutely no tedium. You never need to spend 10 minutes a turn working with your PW – if you have border expansion or new cities, you can place the needed tile improvements fairly quickly.
City-level economics: There is a difference in how Civ3 and CtP handle economics at the city level. In Civ 3, cities become more productive with every population point they gain, as that adds an extra worker to the city. In Civ 3, each city has a big X like area around it from which resources are gathered. However, a cize 3 city will gather resources from 3 tiles out of the 20 in that X, but a size 8 city will be much more productive by generating resources from 8 tiles. You can at any time take a worker off a tile, then the resources from it won't be incoming, and your worker becomes a specialist.
Above, you can see that each tile within that big outlined cross has symbols in it, that means resources are being extracted. The mountain tile on the west side produces 1 unit of production (shield) and 5 of commerce (stack of coins), while the northwest mountain only produces one shield. A Civ 3 city can only use 21 tile - the 20 in the cross, and the city tile itself. If your city exceeds that size of 20, again, you must create specialists.
CtP2 handles it completely differently.
Look at how cities have areas around them that are also outlined with a white line. A city gathers resources from ALL the tiles in that area, no matter its size. The trick here is, the area really depends on the city size. A new city gathers resources from the 8 tiles immediately adjacent to it, as the city grows, that radius expands. This has important implications on the strategy. In Civ 3, you can keep up with a Worker or two improving as many tiles as the city uses. In CtP2, you are better improving all the tiles within that city economic radius as soon as you can. And, when the radius expands, improve all the newly available tiles once again.
Specialists: This is highly relevant to city-level economics. In Civ 3, creating specialists can be expensive - you don't want to have entertainers at all, for the long term solutions, while converting a city to that full of scientists will result in starvation. Therefore, specialists are to be used carefully.
In CtP2, specialists are also not easy to mange correctly. However, they come in more types and do more things. Below i a screenshot with specialist control screen.
You will notice that it has a growth bar there. When you add specialists, your efficience bar drops, and therefore the city gathers less resources from its economic area. That sounds bad, but is often offset by what your specialist does. For instance, adding a farmer will usually increase your food gathering, or adding a laborer will increase production. Sometimes specialists are not much of a benefit, though, if the land around the city is very fertile. You will notice numbers above the growth bar that are very good at telling you how much exactly of everything your city is producing. Specialists such as Laborers or Mercants also have prerequisites - Factories and Banks respectively, while Scientists need Universities.
Strategically, you need to take great care with specialists. If you have a city with mines all around, scientists will be a bad idea there, because mines will produce less resources. While Laborer push is a very good strategy for war time - convert as many citizes to Laborers as you can without sending them into starvation, and get many units/improvements in record time.
Stack Combat: CtP2 feautures a combat model completely different from that in Civ 3. In Civ 3, every unit acts on its own. Imagine a city defended by a spearman (defense value of 2). If it’s fortified in a small town, then it gets the +25% bonus from fortification, and the inherent 10% bonus from defending – thus the bonus is 0.5 + 0.2 = 0.7, and so the Spearman has a defense value of 2.7. Now, you have a stack of 3 Swordsmen and an Archer outside the city. You attack with your archer (attack of 2). It loses to the Spearman, which gains an additional hit point. Now, you attack with one of your Swordsmen (attack of 3). It isn’t lucky, and dies, as the Spearman has one hit point remaining. Then, you attack with another Swordsman, and kill the spearman. So, that one spearman has managed to kill two of your units. Does it make sense that while your archer was attacking the swordsmen stood there and did nothing? Hardly.
In CtP2, every unit has the attack, defense and ranged attack values. If the enemy has a city defended by one Hoplite (the equivalent of Civ3’s spearman), and you have a Samurai and an Archer there, you stack your two units before attacking. Then, you attack, and both of your units attack – the Samurai engages the Hoplite in melee, while the archer also shoots from the back row, and takes no damage. The Hoplite will be eliminated without losses to your side. The maximal stack size is 12, and this allows for some great battles, when 24 units are involved. In a modern battle, for instance, you may have 6 Marines in your front line, supported by 6 Artillery units (which are exceptionally weak in melee combat), facing an enemy mixed force of Marines and Tanks. If your front line gets eliminated, then the units from the back line move to the front one, which might not be good for you, like in the case of Artillery, which are only decent in the back rows.
To make it easier to understand for those who have never seen CtP2, here goes an example.
In that picture, you see a pretty unbalanced battle, but that’s not the point. Look at the blue front row. Each unit has another unit right in front of it, except for the leftmost Knight. So, each of those units attacks the one it’s in front of. That letftmost knight has the Flanking ability, so it attacks the pink leftmost Hoplite – which is also under attack from the Cavalry right in front of it.
In the blue back row, there are Cannons and Artillery, in the pink back row – Mounted Archers. These all are units with good ranged attack (though surely Artillery beats both others). As the battle starts, the first thing to happen is a ranged attack by the blue back row, which deals damage to the pink front row. The pink back row also fires, damaging the blue front row. Then, the front rows fight each other in melee. Then, again the ranged units fire, and again the front rows fight. When a unit from the front row dies, it's replaced by a back row unit. Strategically, it's important to remember that the best ranged units suck in melee. Then, this continues until one side loses all the units or until the attacker retreats. Retreat can be initiated at any time by the attacker - the defender's units then get a free shot at the attacker, and the battle stops.
This battle system allows for very interesting and much more realistic battle outcomes. You will never lose 6 units to take a city that’s defended by one defender of the same age. Also, this obviously requires you to do much more strategic planning. A stack of only melee units is weak. Stack 12 Samurai and attack, and the ones in the back row won’t do anything, as they have no ranged attack. So, you need to work on your stack composition very carefully.
Unit Mixing: Generally, you are more likely to use and encounter different types of units in CtP2 than you are in Civ 3. This is not only because of the stacked combat, but also because of the different unit abilities and traits.
Imagine the early-Industrial Age time in Civ 3. You are generally likely to use 3 types of units – I’m taking land units only for this example. Those would be Cavalry, Riflemen and Cannons. Each of these units also has a very clearly defined usage. You mass Cavalry, and throw them at the enemy. Riflemen are used to stack with Cavalry to protect them from counter-strikes, and also left in taken cities, if you choose so. Cannons (which will in fact be skipped by many players) are used to combard the defenders, softening them up significantly before the attack/ Now, you’re not likely to use the Riflemen to attack. Yes, they can do that, but if you’re in a situation where you are attacking with Riflemen, you definitely didn’t bring enough attackers and your planning probably wasn’t that good.
In CtP2, at about the same time, as you enter the Industrial Era, you will have access and are likely to use a wider array of units, for more differentiated purposes. The units would be Cavalry, Infantrymen, Machine Gunners, Cannons and Artillery. Cavalry is a mobile unit with good all around abilities. Infantrymen (Musketeers, actually) have the best defensive ability at this time, but with decent attack. Machine Gunners have the best offensive capability, but don’t defend as well as Infantrymen. Cannons and Artillery are two powerful ranged units with bombarding abilities, but you’re quite likely to use both at the same time. Partially because the Cannons are much cheaper and can be produced in smaller cities.
Since you need to stack units in CtP, it’s not like your Infantrymen will only function in a defensive role. You need some stacks with a defensive/ranged combination, some with attacking/defending, and so on. So to perform well, you would be using four or five different types of units here, contrary to using two or three in Civ 3. Of course, you may also be using some unconventional units (see below) at the same time – I prefer to always have Spies when I am in a war.
It also has to be said that obsolete units are more useful in CtP2. If, by the early Industrial Era, you still have a stack of Knights and Mounted Archers, it can be put to use. The stack is, after all, still mobile. You can use it very well in the enemy land to kill weaker stacks. It only makes sense that a pair of Infantrymen will not hold to a dozen mounted attackers. In Civ 3 obsolete units are generally upgraded to their better counterparts at the first ability, or they can be sometimes used to attack in hopes of getting a lucky hit.
Military Strategy: I have to say that military strategy and tactics do indeed differ greatly in CtP2 and Civ3 – or any other Civ-game for that matter. This is what caused me frustration when I first played CtP, I tried to apply my Civ2/SMAC military experience to the game, and found myself losing wars badly. In CtP, you have to think different, and play different.
In Civ3 (again, Civ3 doesn’t differ much from other civ games in combat, so I could as well speak about Civ2 or SMAC for the purposes of this section) you generally have clearly defined technological levels. For instance, there’s the Knight with attack of 4 and its contemporary Pikeman with defense of 3. At that stage, much warring action takes place usually, and Knights dominate the battlefield (by the way, they’re used almost exclusively). Then, however, Gunpowder is discovered, and the introduction of the Musketeer as a defensive unit puts the reign of Knights to an end. It’s still possible to do limited conquesting, but you can no longer wipe out an enemy blitz-style, and, in fact, conquering something now requires a much greater effort than defending, so war is unprofitable and not advised. Then, there comes Cavalry, attack of 6, and they again rule the world – Musketeers stand no choice, and the Riflemen who appear soon also have a hard time against hordes of Cavalry. Then the Infantry is discovered as a defender, and no offensive action is possible. Infantry is such a superior defender that the amount of Cavalry needed to take down a city with just a couple of these is ridiculous.
In CtP2, technology doesn’t define whether you can go to war or not. It’s numbers and tactics that do. Technology helps a lot, but you can’t win a war purely on technological edge if you’re outnumbered by one to ten. In Civ 3, if you have got Cavalry but your enemy is stuck with Musketmen and will be so for quite some time, you can beat him with ease. In CtP2, such technological advantage means little. You need to have stacks big enough and composed correctly. A lone Cavalry unit won’t do you much good against a stack with 3 Hoplites and 3 Catapults. Whereas in Civ 3, one Cavalry can, with luck, eliminate six weaker units.
For the starters, though, so that there’s no confusion, a few words need to be said on the history and background for each of these games.
Background
Civ 3 is developed by Firaxis , and is the official sequel in the original Civilization franchise. Civ 1 has been developed with many same team member as Civ 3, and so Civ 3, like it or not, is the current legacy. Civ 3 also is a Sid Meier game – while one can debate as to how much influence did Sid actually have in making the game, he is said to have decided on at least some things on the design, and, at any rate, it’s his company that developed Civ 3.
CtP2 is NOT a sequel to Civ 1 or Civ 2. It’s developed by Activision , a company that’s mainly known for publishing games, not making them. Activision has published such hits as Quake III or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, and will in the coming months also publish Doom III. At some point, though, Activision decided to make a civ-style game, which was originally called Civilization: Call to Power (often referred to as CtP1).
CtP1 had many original concepts that were different from Civ 2 (the latest civ game at that point), and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC). SMAC was in development at Firaxis at about the same time as CtP1 was worked on, but SMAC seemed to stick more with the Civ 2 formula, although it had a sci-fi setting and surely added many innovative things to the game. CtP1 aready introduced most of the concepts that are to be seen in CtP2, the main of which probably are stacked combat, public works and unconventional warfare, all explained in more detail below.
As CtP1 came out, though, things didn’t look too good. It received a lot of critcism from Civ oldtimers, mainly for being too original – unfortunately, many people couldn’t accept that this wasn’t just Civ 2 with new graphics, and they couldn’t accept the new concepts CtP1 brought forward. Also, Activision got sued for using the word Civilization in the name of their game, which is a trademark of MicroProse, and later Firaxis, and there were, apparently, arguments about CtP1 taking some other names from Civ franchise. Other areas of critcism for the game included a poorly done interface (it might have had some shortcomings, but it was quite easy to use, actually), and poor stability. Unfortunately, I have indeed encountered stability problems with the game, at least till the official patch.
Not long after that, Activision started working on Call to Power 2 – this time without the name Civilization in the title. CtP2 was supposed to fix the problems found in CtP1, while also adding a couple of new things. The interface was completely reworked, receiving a pretty beautiful style, although some of the things were arguably done better in CtP1 interface. Most unfortunately, the Activision administration decided to disband the development group, leaving the company to deal with publishing games. CtP2 wasn’t, therefore, regarded as a highly important project, and it was apparently rushed somewhat, and as a result, the game had some problems on release, the most notable of which were a very weak AI, big multiplayer problems (fixed in a patch somewhat), and lack of official PBEM, although PBEM was enabled afterwards. David Ray, one of the developers of CtP2, talks about Activision and making of CtP2 in his interview here at Apolyton, which could be of interest if you want to learn more about this game.
CtP2 didn’t make too many changes to CtP1, though the future victory was changed, the space layer was removed, and the diplomacy system was made much better. Also, supports for various mods is even better in CtP2.
Final words – let me say again, CtP2 has nothing to do with Civ 3 except for sharing the same core ideas that make up Civilization games as a genre. The development of these games took place under different circumstances, by different companies and by people who have never worked together.
The differences
While CtP2 has the same general idea that Civ 3 (and any civ game, to that extent), you must realize that CtP2 is a much different game. Note: if I say CtP at any point in this post, I mean the same CtP2, unless explicitly noted otherwise. The idea is indeed to build a mighty civilization as you start with very little, but there are many and many things that make these two games different. I’ll start with the two I would consider the most important, Public Works and Stack Combat.
Public Works: In civ 3, you use Workers to improve your land. Those are built and appear as regular units, and are issued orders to build mines, roads or whatever. The main downside of this system is that the game becomes much about worker management later in the game. In the Industrial age in civ 3, if you have a lot of land, you need, say, a hundred workers to keep it all efficient, and build railroads, and other improvements in newly conquered land. That would be fine, if only you didn’t have to move each of those 100 workers by hand each turn, and give them orders. Yes, there’s the automate function, but it doesn’t always work as you want it to, and will never give you optimal tile improvements. And even with your workers automated, you’ll spend a lot of time sitting at your screen doing nothing and just watching your workers leap around automatically.
In CtP2, field improvements are handled in a completely different way. You dedicate a certain percentage of your total production to go to public works. If you set that to 100%, your cities will not produce anything, and all your production will go to the public works. Now, these public works are what you use to improve your land. For instance, building a road costs 60 public works – normally. That figure will increase if you’re building a road through the forest, mountains or other unfavorable terrain. Generally, with the public works system, you need a lot of planning to make sure that you have enough public works to improve all your cities. But, you can’t just road every single square in your empire like in Civ 3, because going too much of public works will undermine your ability to build things in cities. Also, you can use public works to terraform land – that is, change the terrain type of tiles. Note that most terraforming requires you to have discovered the necessary technology, and consumes a lot of PW.
It has to be sad that many people, even those who normally don’t like CtP, have mentioned the public works system as generally superior. It requires more strategic thinking than workers, and has absolutely no tedium. You never need to spend 10 minutes a turn working with your PW – if you have border expansion or new cities, you can place the needed tile improvements fairly quickly.
City-level economics: There is a difference in how Civ3 and CtP handle economics at the city level. In Civ 3, cities become more productive with every population point they gain, as that adds an extra worker to the city. In Civ 3, each city has a big X like area around it from which resources are gathered. However, a cize 3 city will gather resources from 3 tiles out of the 20 in that X, but a size 8 city will be much more productive by generating resources from 8 tiles. You can at any time take a worker off a tile, then the resources from it won't be incoming, and your worker becomes a specialist.
Above, you can see that each tile within that big outlined cross has symbols in it, that means resources are being extracted. The mountain tile on the west side produces 1 unit of production (shield) and 5 of commerce (stack of coins), while the northwest mountain only produces one shield. A Civ 3 city can only use 21 tile - the 20 in the cross, and the city tile itself. If your city exceeds that size of 20, again, you must create specialists.
CtP2 handles it completely differently.
Look at how cities have areas around them that are also outlined with a white line. A city gathers resources from ALL the tiles in that area, no matter its size. The trick here is, the area really depends on the city size. A new city gathers resources from the 8 tiles immediately adjacent to it, as the city grows, that radius expands. This has important implications on the strategy. In Civ 3, you can keep up with a Worker or two improving as many tiles as the city uses. In CtP2, you are better improving all the tiles within that city economic radius as soon as you can. And, when the radius expands, improve all the newly available tiles once again.
Specialists: This is highly relevant to city-level economics. In Civ 3, creating specialists can be expensive - you don't want to have entertainers at all, for the long term solutions, while converting a city to that full of scientists will result in starvation. Therefore, specialists are to be used carefully.
In CtP2, specialists are also not easy to mange correctly. However, they come in more types and do more things. Below i a screenshot with specialist control screen.
You will notice that it has a growth bar there. When you add specialists, your efficience bar drops, and therefore the city gathers less resources from its economic area. That sounds bad, but is often offset by what your specialist does. For instance, adding a farmer will usually increase your food gathering, or adding a laborer will increase production. Sometimes specialists are not much of a benefit, though, if the land around the city is very fertile. You will notice numbers above the growth bar that are very good at telling you how much exactly of everything your city is producing. Specialists such as Laborers or Mercants also have prerequisites - Factories and Banks respectively, while Scientists need Universities.
Strategically, you need to take great care with specialists. If you have a city with mines all around, scientists will be a bad idea there, because mines will produce less resources. While Laborer push is a very good strategy for war time - convert as many citizes to Laborers as you can without sending them into starvation, and get many units/improvements in record time.
Stack Combat: CtP2 feautures a combat model completely different from that in Civ 3. In Civ 3, every unit acts on its own. Imagine a city defended by a spearman (defense value of 2). If it’s fortified in a small town, then it gets the +25% bonus from fortification, and the inherent 10% bonus from defending – thus the bonus is 0.5 + 0.2 = 0.7, and so the Spearman has a defense value of 2.7. Now, you have a stack of 3 Swordsmen and an Archer outside the city. You attack with your archer (attack of 2). It loses to the Spearman, which gains an additional hit point. Now, you attack with one of your Swordsmen (attack of 3). It isn’t lucky, and dies, as the Spearman has one hit point remaining. Then, you attack with another Swordsman, and kill the spearman. So, that one spearman has managed to kill two of your units. Does it make sense that while your archer was attacking the swordsmen stood there and did nothing? Hardly.
In CtP2, every unit has the attack, defense and ranged attack values. If the enemy has a city defended by one Hoplite (the equivalent of Civ3’s spearman), and you have a Samurai and an Archer there, you stack your two units before attacking. Then, you attack, and both of your units attack – the Samurai engages the Hoplite in melee, while the archer also shoots from the back row, and takes no damage. The Hoplite will be eliminated without losses to your side. The maximal stack size is 12, and this allows for some great battles, when 24 units are involved. In a modern battle, for instance, you may have 6 Marines in your front line, supported by 6 Artillery units (which are exceptionally weak in melee combat), facing an enemy mixed force of Marines and Tanks. If your front line gets eliminated, then the units from the back line move to the front one, which might not be good for you, like in the case of Artillery, which are only decent in the back rows.
To make it easier to understand for those who have never seen CtP2, here goes an example.
In that picture, you see a pretty unbalanced battle, but that’s not the point. Look at the blue front row. Each unit has another unit right in front of it, except for the leftmost Knight. So, each of those units attacks the one it’s in front of. That letftmost knight has the Flanking ability, so it attacks the pink leftmost Hoplite – which is also under attack from the Cavalry right in front of it.
In the blue back row, there are Cannons and Artillery, in the pink back row – Mounted Archers. These all are units with good ranged attack (though surely Artillery beats both others). As the battle starts, the first thing to happen is a ranged attack by the blue back row, which deals damage to the pink front row. The pink back row also fires, damaging the blue front row. Then, the front rows fight each other in melee. Then, again the ranged units fire, and again the front rows fight. When a unit from the front row dies, it's replaced by a back row unit. Strategically, it's important to remember that the best ranged units suck in melee. Then, this continues until one side loses all the units or until the attacker retreats. Retreat can be initiated at any time by the attacker - the defender's units then get a free shot at the attacker, and the battle stops.
This battle system allows for very interesting and much more realistic battle outcomes. You will never lose 6 units to take a city that’s defended by one defender of the same age. Also, this obviously requires you to do much more strategic planning. A stack of only melee units is weak. Stack 12 Samurai and attack, and the ones in the back row won’t do anything, as they have no ranged attack. So, you need to work on your stack composition very carefully.
Unit Mixing: Generally, you are more likely to use and encounter different types of units in CtP2 than you are in Civ 3. This is not only because of the stacked combat, but also because of the different unit abilities and traits.
Imagine the early-Industrial Age time in Civ 3. You are generally likely to use 3 types of units – I’m taking land units only for this example. Those would be Cavalry, Riflemen and Cannons. Each of these units also has a very clearly defined usage. You mass Cavalry, and throw them at the enemy. Riflemen are used to stack with Cavalry to protect them from counter-strikes, and also left in taken cities, if you choose so. Cannons (which will in fact be skipped by many players) are used to combard the defenders, softening them up significantly before the attack/ Now, you’re not likely to use the Riflemen to attack. Yes, they can do that, but if you’re in a situation where you are attacking with Riflemen, you definitely didn’t bring enough attackers and your planning probably wasn’t that good.
In CtP2, at about the same time, as you enter the Industrial Era, you will have access and are likely to use a wider array of units, for more differentiated purposes. The units would be Cavalry, Infantrymen, Machine Gunners, Cannons and Artillery. Cavalry is a mobile unit with good all around abilities. Infantrymen (Musketeers, actually) have the best defensive ability at this time, but with decent attack. Machine Gunners have the best offensive capability, but don’t defend as well as Infantrymen. Cannons and Artillery are two powerful ranged units with bombarding abilities, but you’re quite likely to use both at the same time. Partially because the Cannons are much cheaper and can be produced in smaller cities.
Since you need to stack units in CtP, it’s not like your Infantrymen will only function in a defensive role. You need some stacks with a defensive/ranged combination, some with attacking/defending, and so on. So to perform well, you would be using four or five different types of units here, contrary to using two or three in Civ 3. Of course, you may also be using some unconventional units (see below) at the same time – I prefer to always have Spies when I am in a war.
It also has to be said that obsolete units are more useful in CtP2. If, by the early Industrial Era, you still have a stack of Knights and Mounted Archers, it can be put to use. The stack is, after all, still mobile. You can use it very well in the enemy land to kill weaker stacks. It only makes sense that a pair of Infantrymen will not hold to a dozen mounted attackers. In Civ 3 obsolete units are generally upgraded to their better counterparts at the first ability, or they can be sometimes used to attack in hopes of getting a lucky hit.
Military Strategy: I have to say that military strategy and tactics do indeed differ greatly in CtP2 and Civ3 – or any other Civ-game for that matter. This is what caused me frustration when I first played CtP, I tried to apply my Civ2/SMAC military experience to the game, and found myself losing wars badly. In CtP, you have to think different, and play different.
In Civ3 (again, Civ3 doesn’t differ much from other civ games in combat, so I could as well speak about Civ2 or SMAC for the purposes of this section) you generally have clearly defined technological levels. For instance, there’s the Knight with attack of 4 and its contemporary Pikeman with defense of 3. At that stage, much warring action takes place usually, and Knights dominate the battlefield (by the way, they’re used almost exclusively). Then, however, Gunpowder is discovered, and the introduction of the Musketeer as a defensive unit puts the reign of Knights to an end. It’s still possible to do limited conquesting, but you can no longer wipe out an enemy blitz-style, and, in fact, conquering something now requires a much greater effort than defending, so war is unprofitable and not advised. Then, there comes Cavalry, attack of 6, and they again rule the world – Musketeers stand no choice, and the Riflemen who appear soon also have a hard time against hordes of Cavalry. Then the Infantry is discovered as a defender, and no offensive action is possible. Infantry is such a superior defender that the amount of Cavalry needed to take down a city with just a couple of these is ridiculous.
In CtP2, technology doesn’t define whether you can go to war or not. It’s numbers and tactics that do. Technology helps a lot, but you can’t win a war purely on technological edge if you’re outnumbered by one to ten. In Civ 3, if you have got Cavalry but your enemy is stuck with Musketmen and will be so for quite some time, you can beat him with ease. In CtP2, such technological advantage means little. You need to have stacks big enough and composed correctly. A lone Cavalry unit won’t do you much good against a stack with 3 Hoplites and 3 Catapults. Whereas in Civ 3, one Cavalry can, with luck, eliminate six weaker units.
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Of course. Interestingly, though, the way I said it (wrongly), is also mentioned somewhere - wasn't it the CtP1 or 2 manual, perhaps? I'll edit my post to reflect that, though - a pretty silly error.
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