Tool I made to easily plan Civ 1 Tech routes

[domaa]

Long time reader, first time poster.

I've been playing Civ 1 pretty much non stop for the last 30 years. Lately I've been obsessed with trying to get a space victory in as few turns as possible. My best is 1560BC, but I know people have done much better. The tricky bit has always been working out the tech paths. I used to keep a spreadsheet where I'd list out the shortest route to things like Space Flight, Democracy, or Railroads. It worked, but honestly it got really tedious doing it over and over.

So I ended up throwing together a Civ 1 Tech Tree Advances Selector: https://domaa11.github.io/civ1-tech-tree-advances-selector/.

You just pick a tech and it spits out the exact prerequisites in the right order. You can shuffle things around too, and it'll update automatically. Basically saves me from constantly redrawing the tree or double-checking what leads to what.

Figured I'd share it here in case anyone else finds it handy. Would love to hear if it's useful, or if you've got ideas for making it better.

 

[Tristan_C]

Would love to hear if it's useful, or if you've got ideas for making it better.

I like this script-driven approach. I use a combo of the original chart and excel, and it is little different in concept than moving cards around on a tack board, i.e., clunky. To make your project "better," I guess it needs to account for the rotation of unavailable tech that is observed above chieftain. This thread is the most recent incident of such discussions that I remember. You'll need to retrieve the index numbers of the tech so that the script can determine whether it is part of the set that is not available at that point in the path (or whether its index is so far up that it's available anyway). For instance, when I made chivalry the goal, the site listed masonry as first tech, which is seldom possible (again, above chieftain). It also requires being able to input the bonus starting techs so they're struck from the sequence and the modulos pushed accordingly

The really hard part about this from a scripting perspective is that most goals, like demo, railroad, and such, will run into snags where none of the prerequisites are available at one or more points in the optimal, beeline path, and an unrelated tech needs to be inserted. Does not matter if researched/traded/stolen/popped, it just needs to increment the number of advances with the right timing. In excel I would have to eyeball these situations to arrange for the snags to be delayed as far into the tech path as possible, to save lightbulbs.