Exciting AI improvements.

[Diadem]

Well writing *is* a prereq for almost every tech, isn't it? How many techs can you reach without writing? Not at all that many.

[sabrewolf]

Originally posted by Diadem
Well writing *is* a prereq for almost every tech, isn't it? How many techs can you reach without writing? Not at all that many.

i just had a look... the furtherst you get without writing is optics.

[binTravkin]

I meant IRL, how much you can do without at least knowing basic arithmetical operations?

Directly or indirectly maths should be a prereq to a LOT of things, bureaucracy being only one of them.
E.g. one can IIRC get Printing Press without maths, but it shouldn't be possible as making compliced devices requires knowledge of geometry.
Similarly Pyramids are impossible without maths and many other projects too.

[sabrewolf]

actually a printing press does not really require geometrical theory. in the end it's just a sophisticated wheel. i think we have to distiguish mathematics as the general concept (like you were implying) and mathematics as a science (as i assume the game is meant to be).

that being said, the borders in civ4 are not clear. for instance musical theory is based on maths, but music can be composed and performed by anybody with a certain amount of brains.

on the other hand i don't think that a compass is worth much without maths. in fact, compass should have calendar as prereq and calendar should not require maths but merely writing...

but hey... those are just "IRL shoulds". the current civ4-system works perfectly and the fact that virtually nothing changed for the warlords expansion shows that it was and is well balanced.

[binTravkin]

in the end it's just a sophisticated wheel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Handtiegelpresse_von_1811.jpg

I would like to see the genius who can make a working printing press without a single calculation beyound basic arithmetics. Even the simplest 'sophisticated wheel' requires knowledge of PI to properly place the items on it.

i think we have to distiguish mathematics as the general concept (like you were implying) and mathematics as a science (as i assume the game is meant to be).

No, in the game is meant to be a general use of mathematics more complicated than 1+1+1+...+1 in day to day life, samely as writing and alphabet as very basic concepts. If it's not, that's a bad inconsistency as most techs seem to be just what they're named for.

on the other hand i don't think that a compass is worth much without maths. in fact, compass should have calendar as prereq and calendar should not require maths but merely writing...

Maths is absolutely necessary to make calendar.
If all you can do is one plus one, there's no dreaming about 365.

Compass on the other hand can do totally without maths.
It doesn't take even 1+1 to walk straight north, or in any other direction as long as you remember where you are going to.
Even novadays there are only so many people who use compass fully, like calculating azimuths and using those calculations to estimate the route.

[sabrewolf]

re PP: what i meant was that in effect it's a plate with make metal-based lettres, a rotating cylinder (the "wheel part") whith big weight on in and a slideable thing between for the paper. it's more an engineering work than mathematical.
but ofcouse, the REAL printing presses were much more sophisticated. your picture is from 1811, 370 years after gutenberg's. this one from the 16th century does not even have a cylinder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PressHist.JPG


calendar: as you said, mathematics is not just 1+1+1... so 365 is still possible. for a calendar you don't need to be able to calculate the days of the year. a sun dial to show the angle and length of the shadows already says quite a big deal about the time of year. and lunar cycles are also pretty simple to understand.
but again, it depends on the definition of calendar...

as for compass: sure, you can walk north for 3 days, then northeast for 2 more. but in the end you are using maps, be it painted (with writing to mark the various places and points of reference) or from your head.
i was referring to the most common use of compass: out on open sea, where you don't have any points of references like mountains, cities, lakes, etc... except the stars. and before astronomy started to be a viable way of navigating (which historically actually started earlier than compass, afaik), you had to use spherical geometry to distiguish where you were with a compass


anyhow, sorry for thread-jacking!

[Diadem]

You need mathematics for both compass and calendar. You can walk north, or notice there are 4 seasons, without mathematics, but to do anything more sophisticated you need mathematics.

The game is wrong in its placement of mathematics. You don't need writing to do mathematics, and mathematics should be earlier. It is dead wrong in its placement of astronomy, which should be way, way earlier. Astronomy and mathematics (I don't think there was a difference between the two at the start) are very, very old. We all know what the oldest profession in the world is, and the 2nd oldest was probably that of soldier, but astronomer would make a good 3rd. People have been studying the stars for a very long time.

And fact you probably need a basic understanding of astronomy (and the calendar) to even be able to do agriculture.

But there are more quirks in the civ4 tech tree. You can research future technology without agriculture. That's weird. Mining is one of the 6 first technologies, though I don't think mining is all that old. They certainly had quarries a long time ago, but real mines? Yet in the game mining is a prereq for quarries, instead of the other way around.

Even funnier is that you can build and launch the space ship without researching flight. That's just plain insane.

[Diadem]

For gameplay the tech tree is pretty good, don't get me wrong. But from a historic point of view much doens't make sense.

About 2000 years back they had all the techs up to the first 7 rows (7th row is code of laws etc), plus music, philosophy (which was ancient by that time), paper, education and astronomy. With one major exception: The compass. Why that is so early I don't know. It wasn't introduced in Europe until the 12th century. They had it a bit earlier in China, about 1700 years ago, but that's still much later than all other techs around compass, and the Chinese didn't really use it for navigation until the 11th century anyway.

Another horribly misplaced tech is nationalism. What is it doing there? Nationalism didn't gain momentum until the 18th or 19th century, and even at the very earliest you can't place it before 1648. And why is it a prereq for democracy, which the Ancient Greek already had? Why does democracy unlock universal suffrage by the way? That's a 20th century invention.

Oh well, I'll stop ranting and just enjoy the game. But it would be nice if firaxis hired a better historian for civ5

[Quillan]

A lot of the time, the techs don't really represent what they are named. Your example of Astronomy, for example. Astronomy is the study of the stars. As you said, men have done that for millenia now. What the game tech Astronomy represents really is the ability to fix longitude. Only by that could you get an accurate location on the world, and navigate effectively. They did circumnavigate the globe before that, but reliable ocean travel really came about with the development of the chronograph.

[absimiliard]

Originally posted by Diadem
Mining is one of the 6 first technologies, though I don't think mining is all that old. They certainly had quarries a long time ago, but real mines? Yet in the game mining is a prereq for quarries, instead of the other way around.

Historically mining and quarrying not descended from each other.

We have some excellent flint mines in England that pre-date metal-working of all kinds. They're solid mining operations, quite extensive tunneling.

Quarrying shows up all over the world, and certainly post-dates mining, but probably isn't related to it. Quarrying is mostly about the controlled cutting of large blocks of stone, and is almost always an open-air project involving large, well-organized, groups of workers.

So if mining and quarrying are related, it's a co-eval relationship not a parental one. Think siblings or cousins, not parent-child.

-abs
(Archeology is my passion and I couldn't agree more, a good historian/archeologist would have a lot of work to do revising the Civ tech-tree. That said, Civ isn't actually a very good simulation of what historically happened here on earth, it just happens to be a damn fine game that feels like it simulates history.)

[Diadem]

Well the main problem with civ techs is of course that most of the things that are represented as one single technology where in fact things that were slowly developped, and improved time and time again, over periods of hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.

There's no single concept of mathematics that was invented at a single point in time. Mathematics was developped over thousands of years. Same with many other inventions.

Still though, more realism is possible without making the game less fun to play, or overly complex.

[binTravkin]

Mining is one of the 6 first technologies, though I don't think mining is all that old.

First mining/quarry operations are as old as 100k yrs (see 'human evolution' @ wiki)

Another horribly misplaced tech is nationalism

Nationalism is almost as old as nations, it's only the flourishing of it in 18th-19th what makes us think it's young.

[MikeH]

Do you think this tech tree discussion could go in a seperate thread?

[binTravkin]

Don't resurrect it, post on-topic.

[rjmatsleepers]

Blake,

I've recently hit a bug whereby there is a pop-up that tells me I've cicumnavigated the globe even though I haven't. I suspect this is a bug introduced by some changes I've made to the XML (although I don't understand how). But is there any possibility it comes from your AI changes?

RJM