Tech Tree Revisions

[Vokarya]

Yeah Sanitation can move. I left the tree in case you would insist on the Sanitation -> Civil Service arrow. I do feel grateful that you understand my feelings on overrides in cases like for that tech.
You can try that out for Paper, but I have come to expect the worst in every case that an arrow has to descend. They're predictable when they go up; not when they come down. Or... why am I theorizing when I want to check it myself?

*applies change, tests*
Bologna. Moving Paper down makes the arrow from Alchemy draw to the top of Paper, while Theology draws to Paper's middle. Pure applesauce.

Extract the file and then drop the .bk extension. I confirmed Sanitation can move but it's not in this file.
edit: You can't move Machinery anyway because Guilds and Engineering have to be in this orientation. The arrow to Guilds will ascend late, going through Engineering. derp you meant smithing. that's fine

I'm getting "Unsupported compression method for 'CIV4TechInfos.xml.bk'. Could you try compressing it without the bk extension? That might be messing it up. (I have 7-ZIP 4.65 on the computer I'm using right now.)

 

[Vokarya]

I'm working with the screenshots now to update the XML file. I'm making some small adjustments to the Ancient Era.

• Move Woodworking up a row (Y=5).
• Move Archery down a row (Y=7).
• Move Bronze Working up a row (Y=5).
• Move Warfare up a row (Y=7).

The effects of this change are you don't have such a long line from Stone Tools to Woodworking and Warfare is better centered between Athletics, Horse Breeding, and Monarchy.

I took screenshots. (Ignore the last column; I'm making the XML changes column-by-column to appreciate the effect and this was as far as I got, so the arrows at that point are still tangled.)

 

[Vokarya]

I'm finding a few more places to tweak and thereby straighten things out.

In the mid-Classical, it looks better to swap Politics and Ancient Medicine, since both come off Code of Laws. Then you can draw Politics-Vassalage-Feudalism as a straight line and not have to run a line all the way from Aristocracy.

Also, Sanitation - Civil Service is a better line to draw than Politics - Civil Service. Sanitation is one of the OR prereqs, so drawing the arrow here preserves more information. I think Canals-Sanitation-Civil Service also looks better than the longer line from Politics.

At the bottom of the screenshot, you should notice a line off Philosophy. This line now leads to Alchemy at the bottom of the tree. I think a long straight line is better than a long bent line. Alchemy's prerequisites are Glass Blowing + Ancient Medicine + Philosophy + (Engineering OR Theology). I feel you have to have Philosophy before you can get Alchemy, and since Engineering does NOT require Philosophy, Philosophy has to be explicitly called out. So drawing a line off Philosophy is one possible option.

There are two things I am still looking at.

• First, Canals-Sanitation-Civil Service-Usury is a self-contained unit without any connections to the rest of the tech tree. I'd like to push this down and move Machinery-Engineering up. I'm not sure how well it work.
  
• Second, I'm going to try moving the entire Medieval Era down a row to move Alchemy-Optics up to the top row and draw the Theology-Alchemy line. This will preserve more information than running a line off either Ancient Medicine or Philosophy. This is going to depend on how many arrows have to bend.

 

[Vokarya]

I think the F6 screen redesign is as good as it is going to get. I'm going to upload it in just a bit.

Moving Civil Service didn't work - Usury got in the way of the line from Engineering to Armor Crafting. Moving Alchemy to the top of the tree did work.

Overall, the new F6 screen will have 4 techs that no longer need overrides (Currency, Sculpture, Scriptures, Warfare) and one tech with a more-meaningful override (Paper has arrows coming from Charters and Theology instead of Alchemy).

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

I'm sorry I wasn't around to catch the technical trouble with my file extension. Such rubbish, a dot-bk shouldn't have made a difference.
... and I feel sorry that medieval era didn't work out as I figured. My pride is my weakness...

 

[Vokarya]

Overall, it's better than what we had, so that works for me. The only things that I still aren't phenomenally enthusiastic about are the long line from Herbalism to Fermentation, but getting Fermentation closer to Trade would probably screw up Calendar, and the bent line off of Guilds, because it LOOKS like it should be possible to get Guilds on the same line as Invention, but I tried it and it didn't work.

It also did make me notice something else. I'm not particularly happy with the long bent line from Plastics to Electronics. I think I can relocate the entire top third of the Modern Era to the bottom and get Radar and Electronics together. I can already see how it's going to go, so nobody else needs to try anything. (It requires a little bit of playing around with Knowledge Management so as to not screw up Railgun.)

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Your attachment to drawing from Philosophy to Alchemy is not quantifiable, when Ancient Medicine is the same distance and is every bit as required. But if you really insisted upon it, there is still a way to save Paper. I wasn't considering drawing Civil Service off Sanitation for previously mentioned reasons, but it facilitates the rescue. Alchemy in the middle of the tree can relieve Guilds of Invention, too.

 

[Vokarya]

I wound up with a Theology-Alchemy arrow instead of the Philosophy-Alchemy arrow. Once I saw that Philosophy-Alchemy-Optics was isolated at the bottom of the tree, I moved the Alchemy-Optics techs to the top and preserved more information by drawing the arrow from Theology to Alchemy instead of either Ancient Medicine to Alchemy or Philosophy to Alchemy. See the attached screenshot. Underneath the screenshot dialog box is Optics in row 1 and Paper in row 5.



There is an alternate configuration (Theology in row 3, Holy War/Papacy in row 1, Alchemy in row 5) that lets us draw a clean arrow from Alchemy to Paper, but the line from Alchemy to Optics has to cross either the Theology-Paper line or the Charters-Paper line, and we can't have that. I'll trade one arrow to Paper for keeping the Theology-Alchemy line.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

To see if I understand this right, you would rather an override of Fishing to Pottery without mention of Agriculture, than the line of Wheel-Pottery that there is now?

 

[Vokarya]

To see if I understand this right, you would rather an override of Fishing to Pottery without mention of Agriculture, than the line of Wheel-Pottery that there is now?

I think that would actually be better. It wouldn't be that hard to do. Just move Fishing to row 1, move Weaving down to row 19 and draw the arrow from Weaving to Sailing, then move Stone Tools down to row 5 and The Wheel down to row 7. Then you can draw a straight line from Fishing to Pottery.

Alternatively, it might be possible to include both Fishing and Agriculture's arrows to Pottery, but it would mean losing the arrow from Pottery to Sculpture. Otherwise, the Pottery-Sculpture arrow would clash with the arrows from Masonry to Sculpture and Bronze Working to Warfare. You would have to move Fishing to row 5, and Agriculture to row 7. (They have to be in these rows or the direct Agriculture-Pottery line would run underneath Stargazing. The down-1/over-2 arrow is not the same as the up-1/over-2 arrow.) Rearrange Woodworking, The Wheel, and Mining so Woodworking is on top, pull Archery to the top row along with it, and put The Wheel in the middle. Now you can put Pottery in row 7 and the lines from Fishing and Agriculture shouldn't clash with anything else.

Either way, it saves one line overridden by restoring the Fishing-Pottery line. Is it worth restoring Agriculture-Pottery if it means losing Pottery-Sculpture?

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

As far as Ancient goes, the only points left to gain are Pottery, Priesthood, Trade, and Fermentation's long line. When I worked with the first three, I found that gaining any one of them would cost two or more lines somewhere else. And Fermentation just has to suck it up. Prioritizing Trade's lines warps basically everything. I'm pretty sure Ancient is done.

Alchemy off Theology, which I suppose makes as much sense as Caste System, disallows Paper for as long as Papacy is in the way, under any conceivable arrangement.

 

[Vokarya]

The only thing I can think of that would help Paper is if Optics was a Renaissance tech. Spectacles are medieval, but telescopes and spyglasses belong to the Renaissance. However, if you're going to do that, you may as well give Observatory to Optics, but then that leaves Astronomy with not enough to be viable. I also don't want to drop the Medieval Era below 30 techs, and Usury and Cartography are the techs next in line to get cut if another good Medieval tech idea comes along.

Trade's an iffy-placed tech as well. I think it's included as a throwback to Civ1. If you look at the tech tree, and especially if you look at an older version of the tech tree before I started culling the whole thing down, you will see a lot of techs that were drawn from previous versions of Civ: Chivalry (Civ1), Free Artistry (Civ3), Invention (Civ3), Navigation (Civ1), Nuclear Power (Civ2), Space Flight (Civ1). There are others that were renamed: Amphibious Warfare (Civ2/Civ3) became Combined Arms (which is also a Civ2 tech), Fundamentalism (Civ2) became Holy War, Miniaturization (Civ3) became Manufacturing, Motorized Transportation (Civ3) became Automobile.

Trade is a tech in Civ1/Civ 2, but in those games, it's closer to the Classical Era. It's after Code of Laws and Currency. Civ1 didn't have eras, and Civ2 lumps everything before the Renaissance into the Ancient Era. I don't see a need to change Trade's placement, as I think it's fairly clever to put it in the Ancient Era and make it pre-Currency trading.

 

[<Nexus>]

Maybe Trade could be split into 2 techs?
I guess you don't want to do that but maybe you can think of some good name/concept I could use for Chronicles.

 

[Vokarya]

Maybe Trade could be split into 2 techs?
I guess you don't want to do that but maybe you can think of some good name/concept I could use for Chronicles.

That doesn't solve Trade's original problem. The issue with Trade is that the plausible pathways to the tech, via Animal Husbandry or Pottery or Sailing, are so different and need to be so spread out over the F6 screen to properly show the earlier techs' proper relationships to other techs (Pottery -> Sculpture, Sailing eventually -> Calendar) that we can't draw the arrows to Trade without them crossing over/under other techs. As long as there is an Ancient Era Trade tech, that's going to happen.

 

[Rezca]

That doesn't solve Trade's original problem. The issue with Trade is that the plausible pathways to the tech, via Animal Husbandry or Pottery or Sailing, are so different and need to be so spread out over the F6 screen to properly show the earlier techs' proper relationships to other techs (Pottery -> Sculpture, Sailing eventually -> Calendar) that we can't draw the arrows to Trade without them crossing over/under other techs. As long as there is an Ancient Era Trade tech, that's going to happen.

Only thing I can think of is making it an early Classical tech, and say it represents large scale organized trading that might not exist in such a form during the "ancient" era.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Stargazing onto Priesthood is possible if Herbalism/Slavery both miss an arrow. So it's one-for-one:


---
Fundamentally, you can't get Agriculture and Fishing into Pottery because of Stargazing and the stack of 8 techs in that second column. So I've given up on that.
edit: Well, you can do something like this:

Sailing and Shipbuilding are movable , with Stargazing holding up Seafaring... but this makes more of a mess than it solves. Stargazing pulls Agriculture along with it, and then the trouble is fitting Stone Tools in there. But making Trade 100% explicit is for me the Holy Grail so I'm still messing around with my modeler every now and then.

 

[Vokarya]

Only thing I can think of is making it an early Classical tech, and say it represents large scale organized trading that might not exist in such a form during the "ancient" era.

I think Trade needs more to stay where it is. It provides a good lead-in to Mathematics and Seafaring without pushing them too deep into the Classical Era, and the Bazaar is the one source of a Merchant specialist slot in the Ancient Era. I think Trade also would overlap too much with Currency if it was Classical Era.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

So I was working on Trade. And Agriculture -> Stargazing -> Priesthood is definitely the hardest thing to get.

I have to give up Priesthood -> Writing and Sculpture, but for whatever reason, the solution is just a small distance away from one which has Stargazing->Priesthood and also Agr/Fish Pottery:


I've uploaded it as a curiosity. I don't think these rewrites for the sake of Trade are worth it.

edit: Just as I post that I see this:


It regresses to Scriptures off of Priesthood, but now Priesthood and Trade both go to writing, Pottery is explicit, and *aahhhhhhh* Trade is explicit.

 

[Vokarya]

How many overrides does this need? It seems like we're losing a lot of other lines just to make Trade explicit.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Scriptures, Warfare, and Sculpture. Priesthood trades its line from Mysticism to get the Stargazing one. But you pick up Wheel from Agri and Fish. (In absolute numbers, the first image has fewer overrides, but Trade is gained at the cost of Priesthood->Writing.)

Sculpture is theoretically incompatible with Trade, and I would think that in-context, Warfare from Horseback is a rare case so it's more forgivable. But I am by no means lobbying to adopt this image. If it is no disruption, I just remain interested in the possibilities of this "puzzle".