Logical Advance Trees

In the vanilla game, Advances have little organizational consistency. Sometimes Advances are placed logically and it makes sense that A should lead into B; at other times, you might research a half-dozen Advances just to get to one that is completely unrelated to all those that came before it. Or worse, research a half-dozen Advances and none are really related to one another at all.

And that itself reveals another problem: just how vertically long the vanilla Advance trees are. For example, if you want to research Fine Cloth Workshop in the Age of Reformation, you would have to research nine consecutive Advances before you could reach it, only a few of which can generously be said to be related to textile production. Of course not all the best Advances should be put right at the top of the list, but does it really make sense that you need to research Officer Schools and Imperial Ambitions to make cloth?

Logical Advance Trees seeks to apply some simple common sense to the structure and ordering of the Advance tree. Its design is founded on three pillars:

1. Unless there is a rational reason it should be otherwise, Advances which share similar functions should broadly be grouped close to one another.
2. Prerequisites should be logical. Merchant Guilds did not come about because the New World was discovered, so why are they locked behind this technology ingame?
3. Advance trees should be wider, not longer. The goal is to reduce tedium and make it easier for players to specialize (or adapt more adroitly to new circumstances) without reducing the number of Advances or the pressure that comes from needing to research dozens of important ones each Age. You still have the same number to work through, but now there aren’t a mountain of totally unrelated ones sitting on the path to your goals.

To achieve this, I have systematically gone through every Advance in the game, read its description and considered the balance implications of moving it, and placed it where I believe it makes the most logical sense. Default Advances, country-specific Advances, cultural Advances, religious Advances – they’re all covered, slotted into (what I hope is) a much more logically-organized research tree.

This mod also fixes a significant oversight in the vanilla game, what I am calling "floating" Advances. These are Advances which have no prerequisite set, which causes the engine to place them semi-randomly in the tech tree. If you ever wondered why a bunch of irrelevant government & trade tech was at the bottom of the Pike and Shot tree ingame, this is why. This happened in a huge number of places; I’d estimate that 10-15% of all Advances in the game were floating, including many unique advances for such major tags as England, France and Russia. This mod resolves this issue, adding prerequisites to every single Advance in the game.

No. I do try to put similar Advances close to one another, but by design it’s not utterly homogenous and sometimes they even wind up far apart. I prioritize an Advance’s name and description over its modifiers (in other words, what its historical context was over what it does ingame). A good example of this is the Caravel vessel: although ingame it’s a Light Ship and you might expect it should be placed alongside the trade-related Advances, it’s actually placed with exploration, because its ingame description emphasizes its role as an exploratory vessel.

The goal is not to be soulless or diminish historicity by just sticking every similar thing together, but to enhance both immersion and historical accuracy by placing those Advances which have rational prerequisites that exist outside their ‘natural’ tech section into the section that fits their historical context best.

No. It DOES move Advances between headers (the big-ticket Institution Advances – Renaissance, Professional Armies, etc.) but not between Ages. An effort was made to keep the header trees all roughly equivalent with one another, although naturally as different Ages have different emphases it’s impossible for each main tree to have the same number of Advances. I think I did a better job balancing them than Paradox did, though.

Aside from the floating Advance issue, only one: in vanilla, the Sō tag has no unique Advances because of a miswritten tag, which this mod addresses.

I’ve chosen not to address other bugs (although I reported them to Paradox when I found them) or make other subjective changes to keep this mod as focused and free of feature-creep as possible.

Sure, let me know what you think in the comments. There were dozens upon dozens of edge cases where an Advance could’ve gone in multiple places and I had to make a call. If you think there’s a better place for an Advance you see, let me know what you’re thinking and why and if I agree with you I will update the mod. S’cool.

Logical Advance Trees does not edit any vanilla files, and overwrites the bare minimum of Advances required to construct the lists in their new altered order. While this number is still significant, because no vanilla files are edited its compatibility is very high. I recommend loading this mod near the top of your load order, so any other Advance mods can overwrite this one’s changes if they edit the same Advance. Unless a mod edits the vast majority of the game’s Advances or reproduces vanilla files in their entirety, loading in this order should let you keep most or all of this mod’s Advance structure as well as any other mod’s unique Advance content.

Just to note, I do not intend to maintain compatches for mods except in cases where I use the parent mod myself. No hate or disrespect, it’s just that making this mod was a LOT of work and I don’t want to burn myself out on maintaining it by taking on a bunch of extra responsibility. Other modders are absolutely welcome to create compatches though!

(Some) Asian Advances for Byzantium – Gives Byzantium access to a curated selection of previously Asian-only Advances during the Age of Renaissance, provided Byzantium isn’t entirely kicked out of Asia Minor. Can be used without Logical Advance Trees, but is set up to match this mod’s Advance order.

Netherlands Unlocks All Low Franconian Advances – Allows a united Netherlands to unlock the unique Advances of any Low Franconian state which no longer exists. This is a strict compatch and requires the original mod to function.

Screenshots taken while using the absolutely incredible Dense Tech Tree mod, which I can’t recommend enough.

Usage permissions for this mod are, and will remain, completely open: you are free to translate, fork, reupload, integrate, etc. at will and without notification, so long as credit is provided to me for the original mod. The SOLE stipulation is that you are not permitted to modify these permissions for your own work: if you use my mod as a base, any of your own Advance files must also hold completely open usage permissions.

Made without the use of any AI tools.