The Tech Tree

[Dida]

The civ4 tech chooser screen doesn't make sense. Supposedly, if tech A and B both point to tech C, you can go either A -> C or B -> C. But sometimes, tech C would require some other tech D, which doesn't have an arrow point to C.
I thought this was due to the tech chooser screen being broken and is a bug, but, since this is still the case even with the 2nd patch, it must be a feature rather than a bug. Can anyone explain this?

 

[zyphyr]

The ones where it doesn't have an arrow connecting are ones where the arrow would have to go through another arrow. They aparently decided that arrow overlap would be more confusing than missing arrows.

 

[Dida]

So they cannot make the arrows curve around? That is ridiculous.

 

[Acceptable_Loss]

Instead of arrows the picture of that tech in shown in the right hand corner... it's a required tech, the arrowed techs are all optional... you only need one.

 

[MrCynical]

Any mandatory techs appear as small icons in the top right corner of the tech box, and you have no choice about these. You only ever need one tech with an arrow to the tech you want, since these are optional. Some techs such as flight only have mandatory techs and so have no arrows to them. As far as I know, all the optional tech paths are shown in the in game tech tree, and looking at it the game doesn't seem to have any problems overlapping arrows. They've just arranged it so that there aren't many of them on the tech tree, but all the optional routes are shown.

 

[Sadan01]

And why not just have a look at the civilopedia if in doubt? Or the tips for the given tech?

The tech tree would look too messy if they had arrows for every given prerequisite for every given tech.

 

[ndvsky]

Download my PDF Civ 4 Tech Tree, only 4 pages, ready to print, all links, all techs, very detailed.

 

[allnamestaken12]

It creates a semi hiearchy in the tech tree, as well as stopping the idea of beelining to some uber late game tech like rocketry, forcing you to go through many techs to get to other techs, instead of just going one tier at a time horizontally across the tree.