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- "Bronze is the mirror of the form, wine of the mind."
– Aeschylus
- "I’m also interested in creating a lasting legacy … because bronze will last for thousands of years."
– Richard MacDonald
Bronze Working is an Ancient Era technology in Civilization VI. It can be hurried by killing any 3 Barbarian units.
Strategy[]
Bronze is the first fruit of the technological development of an early civilization - a pliable metal which is easily shaped, but hard and durable. Bronze proves so useful in creating durable tools of all sorts that it ushers a whole new age in human history. Even the tangled Rainforests can't resist these new tools!
But it is one of its particular uses which proves much more important than anything else: its use in creating weapons and armor. In short, before bronze there were wooden clubs with stone heads; after bronze there are swords, spears, shields, and armor. Thus the military aspect of a civilization is born, with a new 
District, the Encampment; its first building, the Barracks (specialized in infantry training); a new type of melee warrior, the Spearman; and a whole new excitement about using metals, which leads to the revelation of the next Strategic Resource in the game: 
Iron.
Bronze Working is one of the most important techs in the late Ancient Era, especially when you need to plan your first expansions. Revealing Iron deposits early will help you secure this most important and useful resource, while also boosting your overall military development through a new district and unit! This, and the fact that it is easy to unlock (with only Mining, one of the first two techs most players research, as a prerequisite) makes it an obvious choice for second or third tech: second if you don't particularly care for religion, third if you do. But even if you're not particularly militaristic and don't care about Iron, you will eventually need this tech to continue down the lower part of the tech tree.
Civilopedia entry[]
The English word “bronze” was liberated from the French term bronze, which had been borrowed from the Italian bronzo, evolved from the Medieval Latin bronzium, adapted from either the Greek brontesion or Persian biranj. Whatever one calls it, bronze is a simple alloy of copper and usually tin, occasionally with traces of other metals for strength, luster, or ductility. Bronze “working” allowed men to create all sorts of useful things (like pans and swords) that were both durable and decorative.
The earliest bronze artifacts – actually, arsenic bronze, alloys of metallic arsenic rather than tin – found by archaeologists in Iranian tombs date back to the fifth millennium BC. Tin-bronze was eventually found to be superior to arsenic-bronze ... and the fumes of the alloying process didn't kill the bronze worker, so that was a plus. The oldest (c. 4500 BC) tin-bronze items have been found in a Vinca site in Serbia, and other early examples include odd bits found in China and Mesopotamia.
Deposits of copper and tin rarely occur near each other, and thus the export of tin from readily accessible surface mines became a major economic factor in some places; in Europe tin from ore deposits in Cornwall have been found as far afield as Phoenicia in the eastern Mediterranean. Besides being useful, bronze was also considered valuable, enough to give its moniker to an entire age of civilization. In Europe, extensive hordes of bronze tools have been found buried near ruins of treasuries, and in China ritual bronzes dating from 1650 BC have been found as grave goods in the tombs of royalty and nobility.
Although bronze is harder and can hold a sharp edge longer than iron, it is also harder to find and pound into something useful. Thus, the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age.
See also[]
- Bronze Working in other games
