Civ V is easily the best civ game due only to the fact that they fixed the horrible civ combat with the introduction of hexes and the 1 unit per tile rule.
Nope, the 1 unit per tile rule just created a different kind of horrible combat. You see, when a melee unit fights, both units take damage. When a ranged unit shoots, only the target takes damage. Regular melee and ranged units both have 2 movement points. You cannot attack when you are out of movement points, and regular units cannot move after attacking. Massive promotions can change this. A melee unit, therefore, can only attack a unit 2 tiles away, assuming there is no rough terrain. A ranged unit can move 1 tile, then shoot its 2 tiles (+1 with promotion) range. Therefore, when a melee unit wants to attack a ranged unit 3-4 tiles away, it first has to end a turn inside the ranged unit's range. The archer gets to shoot the melee, and if multiple archers, kill him before he does any damage. If the melee does manage to attack the archer, it also takes damage 'cause that's how melee combat works.
The average melee unit simply dies before it can do anything. Even in a 1v1 the melee won't really have the upper hand. Mounted units work against archers, but they still die fast to focus fire and eat damage when attacking 'cause that's how melee combat works. Also, mounted units take a penalty for attacking cities. Archers are king of combat. Gone are the doomstacks. In are the doomsquads.
Even though archers cannot conquer cities for some stupid reason, and even though archers do reduced damage against cities, the best strategy for attacking cities is still archers and 2 scouts* because archers do not take damage for attacking a city, and a scout, as a "melee" can autocapture it once the city hp reaches 1, and as a scout it does not take movement penalties for any terrain. You still need two scouts though, because the scout has to end a turn inside the city's ranged attack first, so 1 of them will probably die without being able to do anything (a high-level scout-specific promotion can give a bonus movepoint to capture from outside range). Generally speaking, you can tell a player is a noob if he actually tries to use a catapult, because assuming that fragile catapult even manages to get close unmolested, it still has to spend a move entering range (and the city's bombard range) and another move to set up (2 moves there, so out of actions). Then it takes a turn of city bombard + garrisoned archer and either dies or goes so low hp that its damage becomes laughable.
If you want to use non-archers, consider playing Persians, because the Persian Golden Age gives +1 movement and +10% combat strength to all units (also, Persian GAs last 50% longer). With that +1 move, suddenly you can ambush effectively. But I would still use archers as Persians.
*Exception for Hun battering rams, which do triple damage vs cities, cannot attack anything else, and take reduced damage from ranged. A ram could even 1shot a city from full if low population. Your main defense against a battering ram is to cockblock it with a unit so it cannot penetrate your city. Huns being what they are though, you can expect that defender to die against special Hun mounted archers.
Of course it's completely unplayable due to (1) the AI being incredibly, totally broken (after all these updates, the AI still doesn't have the slightest clue how the combat system works, no matter the difficulty) and (2) Multiplayer being completely broken. If they fix either it'd be an amazing game.
Yeah, I don't bother with AIs who cheat, get free wonders, and are vulnerable to idiot trades like borrowing gold before attacking, selling useless luxuries for huge gold, and just trading them for all their money so that the AI massing a huge army to attack now has no money and must disband due to negative gold per turn.
Multiplayer is actually playable. It still occasionally bugs, stalls, or crashes though.
They prefer milking their players with single civ dlcs.
Yep. Lack of mod support is bullshit. To be fair, you *can* mod Civ 5 as much as you like... if you enjoy singleplayer or play-by-email.
Civ 3 is the one civ I never played, but from the description it doesn't look at all what I described; it just looks like a pooling together of the hitpoints/attack/defense rating of three units together.
Civ 3 is fine. It basically pooled a bunch of Sid Meier's Alpha Centuari improvements back into regular civ. Alpha Centauri is still the best civ though.
Did the different promotions seriously affect the way you used them in the game, or did they just give you better units to put in your pile?
They actually did. With the right promotions units could attack more than once per turn, gain special bonuses ranged/mounted/armored/cities, heal every turn instead of needing to burn an entire turn for healing, and increase the heal-rate of adjacent units. So depending on promotions, units could become effective in different ways. But, most of the good promotions are high up so you're not going to see them unless you have a lot of war, are running the Honor social policy tree (okay for warmongering, bad for everything else - worst of the 3 starting trees), or it's lategame and you have enough barracks tiers to make them start with 3 levels worth of experience. Not to mention, when a unit levels on the battlefield, you are probably just going to burn that promotion for a 1time 50hp heal instead.
