Civilization Revolution — Project Hub

The next title in the Game Annotation Series, but a different method: CivRev can’t be cheaply decompiled (no source, console/mobile binaries, the original purged by the iOS 32-bit cull), so this is a strategy/game-design analysis grounded in community tables + small exploratory models — not an assembly deep-read. This folder is the working home for that data and tooling; the portable thesis lives in research/gaming/.

Thesis (the deliverable): Civilization Revolution — The City-Builder That Plays as a Rush — the intended city-builder collapses into an opening decapitation rush + a wide-expansion MIRR snowball; building tall, culture, and the game’s designed identity are dead verbs. Frameworks it instantiates: The Dead-Verb Test (specimen #2), The MIRR 4X Framework (live confirmation), The Hollow Opponent, Dominance-Frontier Lens.

Why a project, not just vault pages

The thesis pages are portable theses (they stay in research/gaming/). This project exists to hold the things a research page shouldn’t: the structured game data and the engines/generators we build to explore the strategy space (the CivRev analog of NA1’s sim/tools). Started in-vault; extract to a sibling repo later only if a real code base grows (as NA1 did on 2026-06-05).

Structure

data/ — the game tables. Raw Tier-1 captures live in the vault’s raw/civrev-*.md (source of truth); data/ is for the structured (JSON/CSV) versions the tools consume, once built.
tools/ — engines/generators (planned): a tech dominance-frontier calculator, a wide-vs-tall MIRR model, an opening-rush feasibility model. None built yet.
Thesis — research/gaming/civ-revolution-wide-rush.md (portable, stays in research).

Grounding status

Captured (Tier-1, community wikis), in raw/: technologies, wonders, units, buildings, civilizations, great people, relics, terrain, combat modifier structure, resource→tech map. See raw/civrev-civilopedia-tables.md and its four companion files.

Load-bearing gaps (parked — no usable measurement oracle): the city growth/food curve (would turn wide-beats-tall from “tends to” into “by X”), the Republic 1-pop-settler rule + founding pop, the AI opening tempo (~5/~10-turn clock), the rush-cost formula, unit sell values, and the per-resource bonuses (paste the 403’d Fandom table). Why parked: the original CivRev no longer runs (iOS 32-bit cull), and CivRev2 is a content reskin (same mechanics) with a tablet UI too weak to experiment in — no unit-selling, auto-advancing turns, no city-worker assignment (the build-vs-tech/gold lever). A handheld ROM (the DS version) would be the better, more RE-accessible oracle, but it’s unacquired and low priority. The thesis’s structural claims stand on the captured tables regardless; only the magnitudes wait.

Built

tools/tech-frontier.py — dominance frontier over the first-discover bonuses; found the 4-of-46 thin spine + the 1→2-city rush-order flip.
tools/trap-detector.py — dead-end-leaf + dominated-unit detector; Navigation is the lone tech-trap.
tools/civrev_data.py — shared single-source data, grounded to raw/.

Next steps (when picked up)