I hope that this hasn't already been talked to death on the board already, but I have been lurking for awhile now and haven't noticed it;) .

Anyway, I was just looking at the tech tree at the civfanatics site that has all the prerequisites explicitly shown for everything, and I noticed that agriculture is not actually REQUIRED for anything. Pottery can be gotten with fishing, and animal husbandry can be gotten with hunting. Now, I'm not saying that agriculture should generally be skipped, but on something like an islands map where you want fishing anyway;) , and have no grain type resources, you might be better of simply ignoring agriculture for a very long time, since you probably want hunting anyways for archery and possibly the spearmen.

This is just something that surprised me a little:eek: , since each of the other starting techs are actually REQUIRED to pick up a later tech on the the tree, so skipping any of the others can have possibly bad consequences in the distant future, but agriculture didn't.

I hope that people might find this interesting.

Agriculture can be ignored until a later time. It is good if you have grain or rice nearby otherwise it can wait. On easier levels it is one of the gifted techs from the goody hut.

Well having extra prerequisites also gives you a research bonus. So if you have fishing AND agriculture (and wheel of course) you will get Pottery faster.

So unless you really want Tech X real soon, it makes sense to research all prerequisites before starting it (assuming you would be researching those prerequisites anyways)

It's also rare to not need farms. That requires you to have mostly grasslands or animals in your territory. But yeah, I've noticed that it often is one of the latest worker techs I get.