The Wheel is often the first advance a C-evo nation will seek, because it gives an immediate increase in the speed at which advances are discovered as soon as you have built any road on a grassland, plains, prairie, tundra, or even desert tile that is being worked. It can usually be partly obtained in a technology exchange with the first nation you befriend if you have researched something else such as Alphabet. The effect is doubled when you build a Superhighways system, but that will provide no benefit under your initial government, Despotism.