Whats the big deal with Civil Service?

[Possibility]

I keep seeing so many posts about slingshots to Civil Service. Why does everyone want that one tech as soon as possible?

Possibility

[johnmcd]

It's hugely more expensive than anything else available at the time, you'll likely found Confucianism on the way to it, with a follow up beeline to Machinery you can be rocking macemen around 0AD if all goes well.

[Silver14]

+50% hammer production and +50% commerce production in the capital.

[Crossfire]

And you can string farms together. And you can build courthouses because you also just got CoL.

[Brizey]

CS=

all of the above.

It is probably THE most pivotal tech in the game.

[Blake]

You can also trade the tech for a lot of useful stuff.

[axisworks]

Courthouses and the 50/50 capital benefit.

[Shaka II]

Very good to trade. Alphabet, Code of Law, Civil Service, Paper, and Education, is often the path I take, not necessarily in that order, partly because the AI is off on religious techs, leaving this path open to discover first and trade to back fill all the other techs.

[nullspace]

Originally posted by Silver14
+50% hammer production and +50% commerce production in the capital.

I think this is the main point of getting it early. This is huge when you only have one or two cities.

[Quillan]

There are a lot of benefits to getting Civil Service, which have already been mentioned. The main benefit to the slingshot method is getting it fast. Even on normal, that tech generally takes 20+ turns to research. Some people really like the Spiritual trait because it saves you a turn here and there; the slingshot has the potential to save you 50 turns depending on your game speed.