Hi all! I've been playing Civilization the board game and the Wisdom and Warfare expansion for about 10 months now, and love the game! Have played Civ on the PC since the mid-90s as well.

I'm working to make some house rules and miniatures for replacing the combat system, to allow for 1 unit per square combat using dice. Does anyone have experience with doing this?

Was thinking of making a combat system with 3 units types (Infantry, Artillery, and Mounted), and 4 era's (Ancient, Medieval, Industrial, Modern), just as in the base game. Each unit type in each era would have a unique miniature (with some Civ's even having a culture-specific miniature).

The combat would be dice-based, with the era of the model corresponding to the number of dice rolled. Ancient unit = 1 die, Medieval = 2 dice, and so on. Highest roll wins combat, very simple. With some modifiers to the rules for rock/paper/scissors, and the Biology/Mathematics/etc combat bonuses, as well.

The aim would be to give the game more of an intuitive (ie, Civ for the computer) feel and remove the abstraction from combat.

Thoughts?

Why not use a system like Arkham Horror? You define a fixed number for strenght for eacht unit, based on their rank and add bonusses depending on techs you own. This will be a fixed number for all the available units in the game, predefined and for every game. The number of strenght is the number of dice you may roll when attacking.

Each 5 or 6 rolled causes one damage to the unit being attacked.

Doing it this way is always a suprise when attacking. Will you kill the defender or not. Now it's based on the number on the cards so when being trumped you always know the outcome. With the dice system you don't.

I think that it should be as follows:

3 types of miniatures: infantry, artillery, and mounted.

Their strength is determined by their rank, and in combat, they roll dice up to their strength. They damage the enemy being attacked for every 4-6 rolled on a die.

Also, different types of units at different ranks would have different movement speeds (mounted would be the fastest).

Artillery would be able to attack enemy units without them being allowed to battle back.