I feel tech trees are definitely in need of some fundamental change (like folder nations as one example).
I mean the system designed for solely interwar and ww2 aircraft for UK, Germany, USA, Japan and USSR. Now we also have France, Italy, Sweden China and Israel as well as ground vehicles, coastal+ bluewater vessels, helicopters and ucavs spanning from ww1 to modern day with several subtree and gap fillers nations.
Now it’s a very large amount of bickering of who goes where and domestic vehicles having to compete with subtrees and one off additions (as an example, where will we have room to add Swiss ground vehicles in the German tree).
Are the 10 trees (most of which have 1 or 2 subtree nations) we have really the best way forward?
I wouldn’t say outdated, I think they have a place, it’s just how Gaijin has been treating every other nation that’s an issue.
After all, being able to select and play your nation is great, what’s not great is filling said nation with other nations that are treated as lesser because Gaijin doesn’t want to spend time or effort or having your stuff ripped apart.
Also, most ideas to get around the issue don’t work in a line-up-based game, and quickly lead to only OP vehicles allowed or treat other nations as even lesser than sub-trees.
Im going to have a hot take and say that I believe tech trees and subtrees ultimately arent bad idea, they just have lots of issues.
Most additions are half baked, there are still massive gaps, theres competition of domestic vs subtree stuff etc.
The constant bickering of which country goes where doesnt exactly help either.
BUT
Let us take a big sip from the truth cup - not every country will be represented as standalone in WT, nor they should be. We simply dont need 80% copypaste standalone TT to introduce 20% of unique vehicles and modifications.
Im fine with current system staying, it just needs to be fixed and expanded upon.
Tech trees are going nowhere because it forces people to buy multiple premiums/ premium time to grind through all the copy slop to get the few unique things in the tree.
It would be nice if they stopped splitting nations through multiple trees though, it might be an easy solution to filling gaps for gaijin, but it sucks for those of use from those nations that might want to actually make a lineup of our vehicles.
There is no easy way for Gaijin to revamp the tech trees without taking away (or giving away) the work and money players have put into the existing structures. Changing the game progression structure even becomes a legal liability when it comes to financial “investment” in the game.
And they haven’t done much to make things better. Blatant cut and paste cross tree padding of vehicles (like the M44/55s for example) don’t help the situation.
I honestly wouldn’t more nations being reduced to subs although not like current trees where tons of unique vehicles are skipped or made events.
I do wonder what the trees would be like if Italy was the last tree we got considering it was the last nation that can have a air, ground, naval and heli force to a somewhat similar extent to the other older trees where Israel, Sweden and China fail in the naval segment (not to mention the Swedish heli tree just barely exists).
Well, if you ask me, I’ve never really liked national tech trees concept, because it leads to imo a few big issues:
countries are different in terms of the amount of tech and military capabilities;
overwhelming “patriotism”, many people tend to only focus on staff of nations they are from;
historical background/popularity of certain nations over others.
That’s why some in-game nations are way more popular than others (major vs minor) and to increase popularity and capabilities of smaller nations, subnations gets introduced, as well as copypaste vehicles, which you unfortunately have to research separately for each national tech tree.
Talking about five lines restriction, yeah, I have a feeling that some vehicles would be ignored and many would be just premium/BP rewards. Like multiple Italian and Japanese props, I mean for example, in case of Italy, we have just received Hungarian line, but there is already too little space to accomodate all the other Italian Interwar/WW2 props.
Although folders can still help, especially if they would accommodate more vehicles inside. Plus we can play with arrows, removing them in some cases.
Ig that’s one reason I gravitate towards AB alot more than RB considering it avoids the whole “us vs them” thing by letting all vehicles of that br range appear on both sides while avoiding the issue of some vehicles being overshadowed by others should we have no trees as outlined by StormRyder13.
That’s on thing that’s always irritated me, despite it being technically possible to increase the folder size up to at least 7 as shown by the German SM.79 folder, I’ve seen statements saying there’s no plan to go past the 4 vehicle limit.
I could imagine some form of rotation being used say one month you have the Typhoon mk 1b/L to research and then after a month it’s the mk 1b variant instead and it would continue swapping each month.
issue with unique vehicles being skipped could be mostly solved with expanding upon the stupid and outdated 6 lines rule. Just have a horizontal slider and now there can be both main TT and sub TT vehicles in the same TT; not adding them is merely gaijin-sided lazyness.
as for unique vehicles being locked behind event, eh. different issue to TT structure id say.
crowded af.
sure the three mentioned TTs have major issues, be it copypaste (first aircraft in chinese air TT im interested in is J-7E, anything before it is just a speedbump) or lack of options like sweden helis.
but at the same time they do have unique modifications and vehicles that cant really fit into any other TT. Take sweden for example, you go from copypaste centurions to heavily domestically modified centurions to domestic cheese wedges to copy paste 2A4s to heavily domestically modified 2A5s. Not mentioning the fact that rank I through IV contains mostly domestically produced vehicles.
I dont see a main tree in which sweden could be a subtree, simple as. So its better off as standalone.
The tech trees have plenty of room for more vehicles, so they’re fine. Tech trees aren’t anywhere close to full capacity.
Also a correction: The tech trees came with early cold war.
We’ve also had announcements of more tech trees in the works; which we speculate include Poland.
