Statistics
Your civilization has six primary metrics, all of which will have major affects on your strategic considerations. In order, they are:
Attack: The attack strength of your units.
Defense: The defensive strength of your buildings.
Agility: The rather-unfortunately-named statistic for your rate of population growth.
Speed: The speed at which your units move across the map. Also has an annoying, double-width icon.
Crystal Init: The number of magic-enabling crystals you start each level with.
Crystals Amount: The maximum number of crystals you can hold at any one time. Through the magic of poor grammar, it also improves the rate at which you gain crystals.
These statistics are global so they are applied to all units and buildings under your control. Thus, while buildings can provide a few specific bonuses, keeping your civilization’s overall statistics high is critical to victory. Allowing them to fall behind the enemy’s will only result in anger and frustration.
Trust me on this one. It’s not pretty.
Combat (Warning: Incoming Math)
For those of you who like some good, hard, number porn, here’s a breakdown of how combat works.
When you order a building to deploy to another building, it will deploy half its current population, rounded down, as its associated unit type. These units will march across the map at their base speed, multiplied by your civilization’s speed.
Upon reaching their destination, if it is currently friendly, the units will be added to the building’s population and everything will be fine. The game then calculates two values:
attack = attacking unit’s base attack * attacking civilization’s attack
defense = defending building’s base defense * defending civilization’s defense
The game then performs a quick battle of attrition. Each round, the attacker takes one casualty, and the defender takes attack / defense casualties. This value is not rounded – if defense is greater than attack, the attacker will take multiple casualties for each defender he kills. If the defending building’s population reaches zero, and there are still attackers alive, the attacker will win the battle and the remaining attacking units will occupy the building.
The primary effect of this that you need to remember is that attack and defense bonuses are important – a civilization with an Attack statistic of 20 will be able to take out garrisons of 10 defenders with only 6 attacking units