From Civ World
Technology refers both to a type of Era victory and to the process of advancing through the game via milestones based on science.
Technology Era Victory
Each Era has a Technology victory condition based on being the first Civilization to discover a specific Technology. While an individual player will necessarily be the discoverer of the target Technology, all members of the discovering player's Civilization will get credit and earn Fame for the victory.
Technologies
Technologies also refer to milestones in the Technology avenue. Each Technology is an item that brings specific advantages to the player, including unlocking new Military Units, Buildings, and Civics. Technologies are discovered by generating science in the City, solving the Technology Maze minigame, or by purchasing science from the market.
Civilization World has 53 Technologies discoverable in a set sequence. The order of Technologies and the prerequisite paths can be observed in the Tech Tree.
The Technologies in Civilization World are (in ascending order):
Researching Technologies
To research a Technology, the player selects their choice from those available on the Tech Tree. More advanced Technologies have prerequisites that must be discovered first before they will be available to be researched.
Once a Technology has been chosen in the Tech Tree, its icon in the tree will appear with a blue bubbling background to indicate it is the active or current research. From then on, all science generated by the player -- whether by scientist Citizens in the City, winning the Technology Maze or by buying science from the Market -- will be accumulated towards the total needed to research the current tech. At the top of the Tech Tree is a progress bar that shows how much science has been accrued and how much remains for the current tech. Once the target amount of science has been reached, the Technology will immediately be discovered.
Technologies being researched in Civilizations are collaborative efforts among all members of the Civilization. All players with the Technology selected as their target will contribute their science to the total science needed to discover it. Once the total is reached, the Technology is discovered for the Civilization as a whole: it belongs to the Civilization and is available to all members of the Civilization as long as they remain members. For each new Technology discovered, the player that contributed the most science to its discovery will win a Science medal.
The cost of each technology is initially fixed. For example, at the start of the game, Alphabet requires 3600 science to complete. This value is reduced by 25% for each other civilization which has already finished researching it. It can be further reduced by 25% if the science minister is researching it as well, as long as it is not a technology which would lead to an science victory condition. These reductions do not occur if a civilization has the Closed Borders civic.
For example, if two civilizations have already finished Alphabet, the cost to the remaining civs would be 2025, and if the science minister were researching that tech, it would be further reduced to 1519.
If the player is Independent, they must produce all the science needed to discover their Technologies on their own. However, any Technologies discovered while independent belong to the player and will be available to them regardless of whether they join or leave a Civilization.
