by SOVEREIGN team
A campaign from 2000 to 2075 needs a research tree that makes time visible. That is why in SOVEREIGN it is not a cloud of boxes but a timeline.
Every technology has a year
Every technology carries a historical year – broadband internet 2002, smartphone and cloud 2007, AI accelerators 2016, large language models 2022. Everything before 2000 is already researched as a baseline in the start scenario. The current build has 201 technologies in 12 branches, from industry and energy through electronics and AI to land, air and naval forces.
From 2027 things become speculative: green hydrogen, small modular reactors, experimental nuclear fusion. These dates are design decisions, not predictions – in the tree you recognise them by their dashed border.
Researching ahead costs, falling behind gets cheaper
Researching a technology before its historical year costs more – and not linearly: the penalty for researching ahead is quadratic. According to the specification, one year ahead costs 1.3 times as much, two years twice as much, five years 6.5 times as much. A large lead is practically unaffordable. Conversely, a technology gets cheaper the further behind you are, and through diffusion via trade and alliances poorer states catch up.
What the tree looks like
The x-axis is time: on the left the baseline, then one column per year. Every branch has its own lane in its colour, with the epoch bands VI to IX above. A today line marks the current game date; to its right everything is darkened – that is where researching ahead begins.
Hovering over a technology lights up the chain of its prerequisites in amber and everything it unlocks in cyan. The tooltip names the effects in plain language, the cost today and the duration at the current research rate.
Plan a path instead of clicking
Clicking a locked technology plans the whole path: the missing prerequisites are appended to the queue in a sensible order. The queue can be reordered by drag and drop or by keyboard, and each entry shows its expected completion date. Historical events appear as diamonds on the time axis.
The tree opens in the game with F5. A small excerpt with real data to try out is on the home page, all technologies are in the codex.
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