Synchronising discoveries with the accurate historical dates

[Superstring]

In some board or card games there is the concept of altering the rules of the game through game actions.
How about doing an interface triggered by key events that changes entries of the biq-file and thus changing the game environment for all players?
One of the most appealing uses (of the tons possible) could be that the game time would be compared to the first discovery of key advances and the years per turn rate would be adapted to the actual research speed of the game, so that advances would be MUCH better synchronized with the historical dates of their actual discovery.
Means: no 16th century starship building anymore.

[LDiCesare]

That's very much meaningless in my opinion. China discovered gunpowder very early for instance, while Europe lagged. Why shouldn't they be able to advance from that point the way Europeans did?
Different techs have been discovered by different civs at different periods, which civ discovery rate would you pick? Europe? China? Incas?

[Max Sinister]

And besides: Isn't Civ fun because you can go and say: "It took 6000 years for Humanity to invent the computer... let's see whether I can do better"?

[grap1705]

This synchronisation is definitely not important, not to say it would be a useless constrain in the game flow.

Overall, when we play a game, we're not too far off from reality anyway, which is a good point for the developpers (I tend to be severe on them, so I might as well praise them for once!)

[H Tower]

No synchronization, I want to change the course of history through playing a game, not watch a video on ancient history

[GePap]

There should be no connection between the timeline and historical discovery-for example, who many people discover writing by 3500 bc? and yet that is accurate-and comes before an alphabet anyways. In truth, you start way behind real history technologically most of the ancient age and start getting fast by early medeival.

The system as is works for the game as is-I do think we need some changes to the tech-tree system, but this is not one of them.