Anomalies in the tech tree...

[Vlad Antlerkov]

- It's required to research Alphabet before Writing. Historically, IIRC, the Sumerians had writing for about two thousand years before the Phoenicians came up with the alphabet. Shouldn't the positions of these two advances on the tech tree be switched?

- We didn't go from propeller aircraft to F-117s. Shouldn't there be some sort of intermediate advance, such as Jet Engine (perhaps in place of Adv. Flight, moving the Carrier elsewhere), with appropriate units to match?

- How come Automobile is the preq for the Battleship? I can't think of anything solidly connecting battleships with the invention of the car...

Anyone else notice any oddities in the tech tree?

[finbar]

You're right. There are myriad flaws in the tech tree. There have been a couple of threads about it in the past.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Vlad Antlerkov
- It's required to research Alphabet before Writing. Historically, IIRC, the Sumerians had writing for about two thousand years before the Phoenicians came up with the alphabet. Shouldn't the positions of these two advances on the tech tree be switched?

You're right; many Middle eastern and Central Asian cultures used cunieform before the invention of the alphabet, and the Egyptians and others used hieroglyphics. But I think it makes sense if you regard "writing" as short-hand (no pun intended) for writing on skins or parchment; that, logically, would allow the development of libraries and of diplomats (portable communications).

- How come Automobile is the preq for the Battleship? I can't think of anything solidly connecting battleships with the invention of the car...

This, on the other hand, has always bugged me. When I first played the game, I could never remember what to research to get battleships, or conversely would never notice when I had the ability to build them, because this made so little sense. Of course, in the 60s and 70s my dad drove the kinds of enormous, gas-guzzling, planet destroying Buicks that everyone referred to as "boats"; maybe that's the connection.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Okay, let's put on our thinking caps here.

Alphabet comes before writing because you can't write words without an alphabet or pictographs or knots or something similar. The advance is not "Roman Alphabet", but a symbol system used for recording sounds, words, or ideas. Yes, our alphabet came later, but cuneiform is also an alphabet. Hieroglyphs and pictographs count, too.

Automobile is required for battleships because they use internal combustion engines! The tech is just not clearly named. You study combustion, steam engine, and hey - some genius decides to put the two together - et voila! zee internal combustion engine. Now the ships powered by motors can be huge, unlike the steam powered ships that predated them.

[East Street Trader]

Quite convincing, Monsieur le Marquis.

Although I am not sure what use an alphabet - even a pictogram type alphabet, is unless you already know that you can put the pictogram's together to convey ideas, i.e. to write?

I read something by the SGs the other day which has stayed with me - apparently you don't need Ironworking before you can build an ironclad.

Now that's certainly daft.

But the true test of the advances tree is the way it helps to generate satisfying game play. Judged by that criteria it seems to me to get very high marks.

I might, had I been involved in developing, have advocated the inclusion of one or two more branches within the tree leading to something tempting but also creating a dead end, so you had to sit back and evaluate just how helpful that tempting something would be in a particular situation against the time to research a couple of extra techs.

Again applying the game playing test I would rate the Civ2 tech tree higher than that in SMAC.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Originally posted by East Street Trader
Although I am not sure what use an alphabet - even a pictogram type alphabet, is unless you already know that you can put the pictogram's together to convey ideas, i.e. to write?

Indeed, the desire to communicate something is the initiative for creating a method of doing so. It might seem like a chicken/egg quandary, except that you must have an alphabet to write, but don't need to write to use an alphabet. Cases in point: Lists, particularly of goods, need only convey what and maybe also how much. What the listed items mean can be implied. Knots, the recording method of the Incas, kept track of calendrical events, merchants' transactions, and the like. No writing, but use of a symbolic system to record or transmit meaning.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Marquis de Sodaq


Indeed, the desire to communicate something is the initiative for creating a method of doing so. It might seem like a chicken/egg quandary, except that you must have an alphabet to write, but don't need to write to use an alphabet.

Actually, this is not so. An alphabet is a very specific kind of symbol system, one in which each symbol has no intrinsic meaning but instead stands for a unit of sound (or modification of a sounds, as with some symbols in the Russian and Turkish alphabets, for example). This is a much more flexible means of communication than one in which certain symbols stand for certain whole concepts (as in Egyptian heiroglyphy and Far East ideogrammatic writing), and a later development. What is true is that you can't have writing without some kind of symbol system, but it doesn't need to be an alphabet, and originally it wasn't. Indeed, you can see this even today with children; a child will understand that the complex whole "Rufus" represents his name before he understands that it is composed of the letters R-u-f-u-s, and that each of those letters is attached to a specific sound within the meaning-unit.

Cases in point: Lists, particularly of goods, need only convey what and maybe also how much. What the listed items mean can be implied. Knots, the recording method of the Incas, kept track of calendrical events, merchants' transactions, and the like. No writing, but use of a symbolic system to record or transmit meaning.

This is an excellent example of what I'm trying to say. If the Incas had indeed written using just this system -- by, say, using stylized ideograms repesenting knots -- they still wouldn't have had an alphabet, since a "knotograph" would stand for an idea, not a sound. Clearly, in the game, "alphabet" is a shorthand for "symbol system," just as you suggest that "automobile" is a shorthand for "internal combustion engine" (though I still don't understand why you need a different technology for battleships than you do for cruisers, but then I don't know squat about the history of armaments ).

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Thanks, Rufus, for the clarification. In my effort to make my point, I neglected to choose the best word! I did indeed use alphabet when I should have stated a symbol system of any kind.

[Blaupanzer]

The developers of Civ have a problem with certain weapon systems and their related technologies. The key to battleships, as opposed to armored cruisers, is their weaponry -- the big guns -- and their siting systems. The Automobile (Civ II) or Steel (Civ 1) has nothing to do with this aspect. Similarly, the key to longer-range and more effective aircraft is the ramjet -- jet engines. Stealth is given that role in Civ II, but is actually a counteractant to a technology NOT in the game, radar. Stealth should make the SAM sites in cities less effective or lower their range. Of course, radar should have extended those sites' ranges to the full city radius, thus giving them a range to reduce. How detailed do you get as a game designer? Are you building a war game? Sid said "No," I'm building a society building game that includes a military aspect. So, shorthand has been used in several areas.