You beeline to what you need for your civ to be successful.
Let me qualify my remarks by saying that I play most games on Prince level, and my point of view is geared to the Noble-Monarch range of play. I tend to be very aggressive on continents from the very start and peaceful across seas until Infantry.
In Ancient era, you need the following to have basic functionality: Mining, Bronze Working, Pottery, The Wheel, Animal Husbandry
and sometimes Agriculture. Soon after these basics, Writing must be a priority, or you won't be able to research the better Classical techs. Boiling it down to what can be "beelined" to, that comes to BW, AH, and Writing (the rest of the essentials are prereqs for one of the above) Since you say you have this part down well I won't elaborate on it here.
In the Classical era, it really pays to get Code of Laws first, not only for the religion, but because the ability to build Courthouses means the ability to grow either by establishing new cities or conquering them. I'm not a big Alphabet fan, because in my (minority) view, you hurt your own cause by trading away any tech which can't be traded to an AI by another AI already, except in extreme cases where you can really cash in on a tech (where you can trade to 4-5+ civs for many different techs). I personally would rather have Monarchy and Calendar (assuming available plantation resources) early, which can add the happiness (and some Health in the case of Calendar) which can grow your cities to a pretty good population. Then I like to get Currency and Optics... I'd be perfectly pleased to do them all without ever getting Alphabet.
From Renaissance onward, there are no real standard beeline techs except Assembly Line, because the needs of your civilization will be unique to your circumstances. or maybe the cat that's crawled into my arms has made it awkward to type more...