This folder contains some brief reference materials that come in handy while playing Sid Meier's Civilization:
• An improved flow chart of the technological advances; and
• Attribute summaries of all the military units, city improvements, Wonders of the World, and terrain types in the game.
Feel free to pass these documents on to others who play the game. All I ask is that you keep all three files together when you do so (i.e., Civ Reference.ReadMe, Civ Advances.PICT, and Civ Reference.XL).
Happy Civilization building—and I hope you find these sheets as helpful as I have while playing version 1.1.2 for Macintosh!
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Civ Advances.PICT
This is my own personal version of the Civilization Advances Chart that's provided in the back page fold-out of the instructions. The version in the manual is helpful, but it only describes some of the dependencies among Advances, instead of diagramming them all (e.g., that Physics requires Mathematics). That approach admittedly simplifies the display; but it also makes planning ahead more difficult than it should be. So I made my own flow chart, and drew all the inter-relationships graphically.
On my chart, solid black lines represent explicit dependencies among Advances, and gray lines indicate implicit links. I consider an Advance "implicitly" necessary for another Technology if it was also needed for one of the other pre-requisites to that Technology. In the "normal" course of advancement, these implicit dependencies are therefore already satisfied by the time they are needed. Because "earning" an Advance is not the only way to acquire one in Civilization, though, implicit links can still be quite important to be aware of. (Physics, for example, shows an implicit dependency on Mathematics, which was, in theory, already necessary for Astronomy—and therefore Navigation. Stealing Navigation won't make Physics available, however, unless you already have Mathematics.)
I created this chart in SuperPaint, but you can open and print it with SimpleText. For best results, print it out in landscape mode, reduced to about 55%. The result is a convenient (if busy!) one-page summary of all the Civilization Advances, their inter-dependencies, and the units, improvements, and Wonders they make possible. I find that shading in the Advances on this sheet as I acquire them makes it much easier for me to plan my technological future in the game.
Civ Reference.XL
This file summarizes the other key reference information I often found myself digging into the manual to find. (The on-line Civilopedia makes it easy to look up a single unit or improvement, but it's not so easy to compare units or improvements to one another that way.) There are four tables here:
1. Military Units
2. City Improvements
3. Wonders of the World
4. Terrain Types
The table of military units shows attack & defense strengths, movement allowances, unit types (land/sea/air), resources needed to build, technology requirements, and special effects. The city improvements table shows the resources needed to build, per turn maintenance costs, technology requirements, and special effects. The Wonders table is similar but shows the Civilization Advance which obsoletes a Wonder (if any), instead of per turn maintenance costs (which are all zero). Finally, the terrain table shows: movement points; defense bonuses; natural, irrigated, and mined resource production; and other special effects.
This second file is in Microsoft Excel 2.2 format.
