This version of Sid Meier's Civilization would take ages to play.
Historical Tech Tree
51–60 of 132 posts
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#52Super Easy Improvement: add thousands separator. It's easy to mistake 1,500,000 BC with 150,000 BC.
Also zoom in/out would be super useful!
Great idea though!
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#53This is awesome. I worked on a 'conversational historical timeline generator' a little bit ago: https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
I wonder if something similar could be added here where I say something like "what's the most important descendant of x" and it would bring me to that tech and give me a little explanation of why
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#54Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "inven…
> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#55If you like this then you will probably enjoy the book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by cartoonist and computer-scientist Ryan North.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#56My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
Making sure you've seen this youtube channel, which is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking
I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they go through how to start on a desert island and build a flat reference plate using the three plate method and the build up from there
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#57Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
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Re: Historical Tech Tree
#58Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "inven…
Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing all the nodes, obviously!
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#59A tech tree without metallurgy roots is like building a spaceship with no screwdriver—looks cool, but it’s gonna fall apart fast.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#60This 2D map is hard to explore since it's so sparse. I have to follow lines to find each thing, since it's 99% empty void. Is there a snap to next item hotkey? Am I just doing it wrong?