Again, like I said, it's not meant to be advocating that we take it. It's clearing the air about it being 'useless'. Its important to be clear about the applications of particular techs.
Early Anthropology (29/50-70?) [Social][Science][Open]
-Lead in for a lot of advanced sociology technologies and concepts. Won't pay out for a long while yet, but its the branch of social sciences which relies more upon evidence based methods than on using idealistic or philosophical claims. Should be one of the lead ins to psychology as well.
-Good thing we have a drip.
Early Linguistics (29/50-70?) [Social][Science][Open]
-Similar to Early Anthropology but in our case its critically important for getting anything close to an accurate picture of past empires. We have a head up here since we have original copies of a vast collection of obessesively collected writing from since the beginnings of language.
-This has a bunch of useful lead ins into psychology, sociology, history(of particular relevance is how meanings warp as things get handed down), cryptography and propaganda.
-Its also been implied that Linguistics has impacts on diplomacy efforts with foreign cultures. You can point to the mistranslation debacles in WW2, with the highlight of the Japanese surrender message being purportedly misinterpreted because the translation didn't really convey the cultural context of a polite face saving 'surrender' being interpreted as 'bite me'. Advanced linguistics is pretty valuable to a Trust/Espionage power
Theory of Empire: Romantic Paternalism (16/60-80?)[Social][Rare]
-This is mainly practical uses, seeing as it gives us justification for interventionism around our neighboring minor powers, which is fine enough.
-The lead ins are likely going to be getting advanced investment and interventionism techs that'd normally require more advanced economics to support(and likely would prompt more advanced economic theory to be researched early), because they're superficially loss-making enterprises to contemporary economic theory which only make sense if you were getting intangibles as profit(such as being very smug about being generous and patronizing)
Modern Idealism (38/50) [Science][Open]
-Fundamental science. Doesn't really do much on its own but unlocks a shitload of interesting !!Fun!! concepts. Ideological socialism, fundamentalism, democracy, capitalism, environmentalism, communism, etc.
-Though to clarify you can do these things anyway, but Idealism is how to frame them as a goal in their own right. Which is how you can get people to do things disadvantageous to themselves for the cause.
Electromagnetic Theory (16/???) [Science][Physics][Open]
-Fundamental science. Gates all the forms of EM theory, needed to approach atomic theory,
-It gates the next step in optics. Lasers need electromagnetic theory to arrive at the concept and applications of coherent light.
-It gates Radio and Radar. Radar is bullshit hax once the air theater unlocks, and is pretty damned useful on ships too(though making them work would need a lot better Electricity than we do)
-Immediate utility probably isn't much though.
Thermodynamics (10/???) [Science][Industrial][Open]
-Fundamental science. Gates basically everything involving pressure and heat, so everything from improving steam engines to be safer, to improving the yields of cannon, refrigeration and basically every form of high energy chemistry involves this.
-Immediate utility probably isn't much though.
*I'd go on down the tech list but ran out of free time to write lots of words for the internet
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