There wasn't much of a tech tree for this part of the game. You could grow in strength in a specific area, depending on how much you specialized in it, such as your obsession with rafts, but not too much beyond that. You'd mostly have to rely on trade to get to other people's specializations.
One important tech to note, however, was clay figurines locked behind Ornaments. Along with crafting lots of ornaments and trading with other factions eventually giving you the ability to construct really early monuments that would have allowed for a trade empire. The only megaproject for the era was locked behind that. Most tech that did exist was locked behind ornaments.
The 'Neolithic' mostly focused around an increase in complex tools and your first group of intellectuals in the form of proper shamans who would make it their goal to learn new things to understand the world better. This would later expand into building culture buildings. Deciding what to put in and what not to put in to the tech tree was one of the more difficult things in the quest for me, as I didn't want a giant tech tree full of nothing but small upgrades.
It would probably be more correct to say the technology for this time was the culture trait system. Once you started to get the population for entering into the neolithic, you would have developed a culture group for your area. This would have made the idea of your current culture values somewhat locked in place in said culture group, and you'd start over by deciding what important things your shrines would represent.
Going over all of the culture traits would take awhile, but to summarize, you had eight categories along with the potential to develop 'unique' traits under certain circumstances. The eight categories for the upper paleolithic where you were were:
- Coastal: Which gave you easy migration, prestige, and pop increases for living along the coast.
- Hunting and Gathering: Which gave you nutrition benefits and pop. It was also where agriculture was locked away.
- Diplomacy: At the cost of being pacifist and risking more aggressive nations kicking your face in, you would gain serious prestige amplifiers for whenever you traded and peaceful relations with neighbors.
- Magic: By asking the right questions, beastfolk could start developing very primitive magical abilities. This was already explained.
- Leadership: Your only culture trait that wasn't unique. It was divided into three sub categories that you could pick from. Ones that could burn prestige to maintain order, one that used full on group think to increase the pop cap, and one that tried organizing the foxes to get more actions. This had one of the more serious drawbacks as you would quickly grow to hate everyone outside of your tribe if you delved too deeply into it, but it also had one of the strongest pay offs.
- Raiding: Basically gave increased raiding capabilities. Was something of a trap cultural trait as it would also cause your neighbors to unite against you. It did have benefits in generating prestige with raids, however. It just wasn't sustainable in the long run.
- Stories: A culture trait group that improved your ability to generate culture traits. Including the ability to raise your max cultural traits by 1, effectively making it free if you got that particular trait from the group.
- Nomadic: Allowed you to basically move easier, farther, and set up shop with less difficulty, giving you things like an auto scout for when you arrived.
I was advancing by era, actually. It allowed me to adjust the system where I felt it needed in tweaks, and the Neolithic era was going to be much more well put together than this era as a result.
It just got to the point where I decided that tweaks alone could not fix things.
The Neolithic would have been interesting, but also highly dependent on how successful you or the computer was in certain fields to see what it really looked like.
