Healing your units after a retreat is critical to winning wars in Civilization 7 — a game where wars are inevitable, even if you’re not looking for a Military Victory. But healing in Civilization 7 isn’t very straightforward, and your units will continue to hang out at low health unless you know what to do.
In this Civilization 7 guide, we’ll walk you through how to heal your units and how to increase your unit healing.
How to heal units in Civilization 7
Units in Civilization 7 will heal passively if you don’t do anything with them — including moving them on the board — during their turn.
There are two commands that guarantee your soldiers will heal each turn: skip turn and heal.
Skip turn is the safer but more manual choice. It’ll only skip one turn and then prompt you to control the unit again next turn. This is a great way to micro-manage your army, allowing you to move your troops in and out of battle before they reach full health. It’s also a great way to ensure that you won’t forget a unit that’s healing up.
The simpler and more passive way to return your units to full health is to select the “heal” option, which is on the expanded arrow menu on the left side of the unit tab. This will cause your unit to basically go to sleep until enough turns have passed that it’s fully healed. This will cause the game to automatically skip past them on the next round of turn notifications.
Once a unit is fully healed, it’s essentially brand new, and there is no penalty to healing a unit back from the brink of death.
How to increase your unit healing in Civilization 7
There are a variety of different bonuses to healing you can acquire. Some of these come from the religion you choose, while others might come from your town’s specialization. The Fort Town specialization, for example, allows your units to heal by +5 HP when inside that town.
The biggest and most reliable heal boost, however, comes from ensuring your units are in friendly territory while they heal. As long as you skip a turn on your unit, or select the heal option, and that unit is inside your empire’s borders, they will heal by double the amount as they will in another empire’s tile or no man’s land.
Units in Civilization 7 have a massive defenders bonus, both in their healing and resistances while in cities and towns. If you’re trying to wage war on another civilization, your best bet here is to ride out and attack a town that’s close to your own territory. This will allow you to quickly return a damaged unit to your own land and allow them to heal up before fighting again.
One way around that is to upgrade your army commander with the Field Medic upgrade from the Logistics tree. This will give all units in enemy and neutral territory a +5 bonus when healing. That doesn’t fully make up for the friendly zone healing, but it’s close, and can make a big difference when trying to keep your army healthy when they’re far away from home.
