Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

[Ribannah]

The Wheel as a prereq for Horseback Riding??
Monarchy springing from Warrior Code and Polytheism??
Math and Philosophy are pretty strange, too.

Let's hope this is not definitive

[korn469]

Ribannah

i agree with you completely! when i first saw that screen shot i thought it looked messed up too...i am almost positive that on the tech chart that the wheel still provided chariots...ok if your society doesn't know how to ride horses...then how in the world has it learned how to harness them up to a chariot?

i'm not sure if the tech tree is finished but i do hope that they clean up a few things especially thing like you can have chariots before people know how to ride horses

[Ralf]

A link please. Always add a link to the source.

I have only seen a close-up of the middle age part of the tech-tree, so far.

[korn469]

ralf it was one of the four screen shots in the new gamespot review of civ3 found here

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/screens/0,10865,2801449-2,00.html

[Ralf]

Oh ****! I already knew about that one, but... Ok, I be back!

[Ribannah]

The Middle Age part has some peculiar links, too. I'm glad that art and printing made it in, but .....

Why not:

Literacy + The Mill (!) -> Printing

Polytheism + Philosophy -> Arts (instead of Music Theory)

Arts + Democracy (better: Nationalism) -> Romanticism (instead of Free Arts)

[BeBMan]

Re: Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

Originally posted by Ribannah
The Wheel as a prereq for Horseback Riding??
Monarchy springing from Warrior Code and Polytheism??
Math and Philosophy are pretty strange, too.

Let's hope this is not definitive

Only to the Wheel thing: As far as I know chariots were earlier used as normal cavalry I think (eg in ancient Egypt they used chariots, but no seperate cavalry units) so at least this point seems ok to me.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by Ribannah
The Wheel as a prereq for Horseback Riding??

Check out this step-by-step description how the wheel was invented. Then read some wheel history. Finally, read about Horses in the ancient world.

Interesting! As for the your other objections...

I for one think that the tech-tree seen so far is perfectly OK. Im sure the team havent mix & match the techs together without leaning back on some historical facts. And after all: history is non-exclusively multi-facetted, isnt it? Take theology as a prerequesite to printing press. Why is that wrong? Didnt the printing press come about in order to spread the world of God more efficiently?

[Ralf]

Re: Re: Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

Originally posted by BeBro
As far as I know chariots were earlier used as normal cavalry I think (eg in ancient Egypt they used chariots, but no seperate cavalry units) so at least this point seems ok to me.

I buy that argument. Its good enough for me.

[S. Kroeze]

Re: Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

Originally posted by Ribannah
The Wheel as a prereq for Horseback Riding??
Monarchy springing from Warrior Code and Polytheism??
Math and Philosophy are pretty strange, too.

Let's hope this is not definitive

I suppose History was never your forte?!

I am glad the Firaxians at least did some research before making a new Tech Tree. Perhaps they even used my extensive contrubutions to Yin's List. What bothers me is that Alphabet and Writing are still in the wrong order! Yet I suppose you don't care or didn't notice it....

Despotism:
Sargon of Akkad(~2334-2279BC;dates contested), who plundered all the lands of Mesopotamia around his capitol city of Kish, was the first king whose power rested as much on the army as upon religion.

Since Despotism is a game concept in its own right, I think it deserves to have its own headword in the list. I would like to add the following:
'Between 3100BC and 2300BC, as a result, warfare increasingly dominated Sumerian life, leading to the supplanting of priest-kings by war leaders, military specialisation, the accelerated development of a weapons metallurgy and, probably, the intensification of combat to the point where we can begin to speak of it as 'battle'.

These are, of course, suppositions, to be pieced together from fragments of evidence - the appearance of walls at city sites, the discovery of metal weapons and helmets, the frequency of the inscription for 'battle' on clay tablets, records of the sale of slaves, who were perhaps captives, the gradual replacement of the prefix en (priest) by lugal (big man) in the titles of rulers, and so on. Particularly important is the evidence for the infiltration of Semitic peoples from the north, the Akkadians, who first founded cities of their own on the plain and eventually, after some centuries of conflict between their cities and those of the Sumerians, supplied the world's first emperor, Sargon of Akkad.'
(source: J.Keegan:'A History of Warfare',1993)

The decisive factors that brought about the early civilizations were the new kinds of economic and social organization, the large-scale exploitation of human energy, the formation of ruling classes, hierarchical organization, and the administrative division of labour. Under such conditions polytheism, which had undoubtedly been nascent before, could develop fully. The social order is mirrored in the conception of city and state gods and of a hierarchically organized "state of gods" with a division of labour. The concentration of power and people in one place, in contrast with the wandering of earlier nomadic cultures, enabled fixed central shrines to become influential. Yet the old traditions continued, and not least among them, that of animalism, in the form of conceptions about a ruler of the animals, animal cults, and similar phenomena. Female fertility figures remain generally prominent, such as the Great Mother and the Earth Mother.'
(source: Britannica.com, article 'prehistoric religion')

the Wheel
the chariot (NB: not the war chariot) for carrying goods was invented ~3500BC

War Chariot
soon after 1800BC: invention of light but sturdy two-wheeled vehicles that could dash about the field of battle behind a team of galloping horses without upsetting or breaking down. The compound bow was an important part of the charioteers' equipment.
NB: the chariot is older than Horseback riding!

Horseback Riding:
'No one knows for sure when the practice of riding on horseback first became normal, nor where. But early representations of horseback-riding show Assyrian soldiers astride.
Men occasionally rode horseback as early as the fourteenth century BC. This is proved by an Egyptian statuette of the Amarna age, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The difficulty of remaining firmly on a horse's back without saddle or stirrups was, however, very great; and especially so if a man tried to use his hands to pull a bow at the same time- or wield some other kind of weapon. For centuries horseback riding therefore remained unimportant in military engagements, though perhaps specially trained messengers used their horses' fleetness to deliver information to army commanders. So, at least, Yadin interprets another, later, representation of a cavalryman in an Egyptian bas-relief recording the Battle of Qadesh(1298BC).


Horsemen:
'By the eighth centuryBC, however, selective breeding had produced a horse that Assyrians could ride from the forward seat, with their weight over the shoulders, and a sufficient mutuality had developed between steed and rider for the man to use a bow while in motion. Mutuality, or perhaps horsemanship, was not so far advanced, all the same, that riders were ready to release the reins: an Assyrian bas-relief shows cavalrymen working in pairs, one shooting his composite bow, the other holding the reins of both horses.'
(source: J.Keegan:'A History of Warfare',1993)

'Even after the steppe nomads took to horseback in sufficient numbers to organize massive raids on civilized lands, several centuries passed before the techniques of cavalry warfare spread throughout the length and breadth of the Eurasian grasslands. The horizon point for cavalry raiding from the steppe was about 690BC when a people known to the Greeks as Cimmerians overran most of Asia Minor. This, incidentally, was nearly two centuries after Assyrians had begun to use cavalry on a significant scale in war. The Cimmerians inhabited the graasy plains of the Ukraine, and returned thither after devastating the kingdom of Phrygia. Subsequently a new people, the Scythians, migrated west from the Altai region of central Asia and overran the Cimmerians. The newcomers sent a swarm of horsemen to raid the Middle East for a second time in 612 BC and shared in the plunder of Ninive.'
(source: W.H.McNeill:'The Pursuit of Power',1983)

[DarkCloud]

Re: Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

Originally posted by Ribannah
The Wheel as a prereq for Horseback Riding??

Even supposing that Horseback riding was important in war after the wheel (chariot that was drawn by horses)... a logical argument

They should not be related- horses should be a completely different line of technology

Monarchy springing from Warrior Code and Polytheism??

They must have centered this on Middle Eastern History

[Rhysie]

Re: Re: Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

Originally posted by DarkCloud

They should not be related- horses should be a completely different line of technology

I disagree... It is logical to assume that the first training of horses developed in order to have them pull wheeled carts and chariots, and the training of horses to allow a rider would follow on from such basic training as pulling a wheeled object.

Therefore

Wheel -> Carts/Chariots -> Horse drawn carts/chariots -> Ridden horses

[splangy]

well, this is odd. does that meen horses are better than chariots?

[korn469]

The threat of raids by the Altai and Turkic-Mongol nomads who controlled the borderlands north of China became a major problem during the 21st century BC throughout the great farming regions developing in northern China and the Liao River basin. The Chinese considered these northern tribes to be a barbaric lot and referred to them disdainfully as Xiungnu, a term meaning nomad. All nomads hunted in one form or another, but the Xiungnu lived a life that provided a virtually permanent training ground for war.

War requires learning, organization and teamwork and can be executed efficiently only after intensive training, usually accompanied by firm, sometimes savage, discipline. Here, the Xiungnu had one great advantage over the Chinese; they could fight where they lived - on horseback. They trained horses, hunted in disciplined units under their clan leader, and always practiced using their weapons on horseback. Archery was basic to their fighting prowess and the composite bow was their primary weapon. All able-bodied men, not to mention many women, were highly skilled in shooting a composite bow from the back of a horse while riding at a full gallop.

also i'm almost positive that native americans could ride bareback and fight like that (yes i do know that horses weren't reintroduced back into america until the europeans arrived)...

For centuries horseback riding therefore remained unimportant in military engagements

so could it not be possible that some other culture could overcome these difficulties...it also sounds like most of your sources are dealing with egypt and greece and not giving the eurasian steppes the spotlight, where it seems to me that horseback riding most likely developed

edit

however despite my arguments...this is just a game

and splangy was onto something

elephants are gone...check out the screen shot again

what we have are

bronze working: phalanx
iron working: swords men
warrior code: archers
mathematics: catapults
horseback riding: horse men
map making: trireme

so that makes it all good to me

edit #2

i also figured out what the T's are for...they represent buildings, wonders, and the one in the box is going to be the tech's picture

[Ribannah]

Re: Re: Ancient tech tree looks mighty weird

Originally posted by DarkCloud
They should not be related- horses should be a completely different line of technology

Exactly.

Ralf: Those pictures are suggestive, but not historically proven AFAIK. The Wheel was most likely invented by potters.

Theology as a prereq for Printing is imho ridiculous. The Bible was multiplied by machine not because of a few scholars, but because of the many common folk who could read.

S. Kroeze: I did not say that Monarchy was not related to religion. I think Civ2 has it right with Ceremonial Burial as a prerequisite. I would rather remove the less essential Polytheism altogether and replace it with Mythology.

With regard to Alphabet: just because I didn't mention it, doesn't mean I find it OK! I would make Alphabet a wonder rather than a discovery, available with the discovery of Writing. Possible prerequisites for Writing are Storytelling and Herbal Lore (but that would mean extending the tech tree to the left).

The history books on Horseback Riding are quite vague. The fact that we can only prove its use from a relatively late date, doesn't imply that it didn't exist much earlier. Other animals (camels, zebras) were used as mounts quite early as well, the advance Horseback Riding could include those.
Note also that early on horses were mainly used for scouting and messages, not as regular cavalry.

Rhysie: Horses were used to pull sledges first, wheeled carts came later.