Logical Advance Trees

In the vanilla game, Advances have little organizational consistency. Sometimes it makes sense that A should lead into B; sometimes you may research several Advances in a row where none are related to one another at all. And that speaks to just how vertically long the Advance trees are. For example, if you want to research the Customs House in the Age of Reformation, you would have to research nine consecutive Advances – and this is not an isolated case. Of course not all the best Advances should be put right at the top, but does nine consecutive prerequisites sound enjoyable to anybody?

Logical Advance Trees seeks to apply some common sense guidelines 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. This has produced (what I hope is) a much more logically-organized research tree, with a structure that makes intuitive sense at a glance.

This mod also fixes a significant vanilla oversight, 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 quite strong government & trade techs were doing at the bottom of the free tree for Age 3, 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 unique advances for such major tags as England, France and Russia. This mod resolves these issues entirely.

No. I do try to put similar Advances close to one another, but I prioritize an Advance’s historical context was over what it does ingame. A good example of this is the Caravel vessel: although it’s a Light Ship and you might expect it to be placed alongside the trade Advances, it’s actually placed with exploration, because its description emphasizes its role as an exploratory vessel.

The goal is not to be soulless or diminish historicity, 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.

At this time I have chosen not to integrate this feature. In my view it has extreme balance implications and Tinto has behaved irresponsibly by yeeting it into the game at the end of a beta cycle without adequate testing. I am cautiously open to creating a similar functionality for this mod, but it would require rewriting the mod almost entirely from scratch, because I am unwilling to use Paradox’s slapdash changes as a base. I am looking for user feedback here on whether players would prefer to have all Advances in Age 3 and beyond locked behind Institutions as before 1.3, or want me to rework this mod to create more balanced free trees for those Ages.

Sure, let me know what you think in the comments. If you think there’s a better place for an Advance, let me know what you’re thinking and why and if I agree with you I will update the mod. S’cool.

If you look under the "Known Game Version Support" box next to the subscribe button, you can see which game versions LAT supports. At time of writing, it supports the most recent 1.1 & 1.2 versions, and the most recent 1.3 beta patch.

Logical Advance Trees does not edit any vanilla files, and overwrites the bare minimum of Advances required. 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.

Note that major overhauls which change the start date or alter the setting of the game entirely are probably too different from vanilla to function as intended alongside this mod. Basically all other content should be fine, though.

Just to note, I do not intend to maintain compatches for mods except in cases where I use the parent mod myself. No hate, 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 extra responsibilities. 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.

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. Not yet updated for 1.3.

Screenshots taken while using the absolutely incredible Dense Tech Tree mod.

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.