News: How much space is in a techtree?
Just now we finally got a confirmed vehicle limit per rank, so we actually have a proper way of defining how much space is in a tech tree!
According to this, a vehicle folder is limited to 3-4 vehicles. Since we already know the hard set limits of five lines per tech tree, as well as three vehicles (potentially folders) for each line per rank, it’s now possible to fully calculate the exact amount a research tree has!
So assuming all the space is used regardless of logical placement, we can calculate this as:
5 [Lines] * 3 [Folders] * X [Vehicles per folder] = Total amount of space
Now using the high estimate [4] from the given value of 3-4 as our X, we can calculate a maximum space limit:
5 * 3 * 4 = 60
This gives us 60 vehicles per rank as the maximum available space, which gives us 480 vehicles in total for the ground and air research tree with eight ranks each, 420 for bluewater naval with seven ranks, 300 for coastal naval with five ranks and lastly 180 for Helicopters spanning three ranks.
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On paper this seems like a lot, however when keeping in mind logical progression this does break apart rather easily. This is also reflected in official statements
Here we see that this limit is only a theoretical maximum, there will be 3-4 vehicles at most in a folder, and vehicles in a folder are required to be placed around the same BR.
Additionally, research trees all follow a general structure, where you couldn’t simply place any vehicle in any line. Mostly they are divided by vehicle type, but where progression allows also sometimes by other factors like manufacturers or their historical role. In current subtrees, we also sometimes see a division by nation, such as in the mostly Finnish / Hungarian lines in the Swedish / Italian research trees.
Reasonably it can be said that especially when dealing with multiple nations in a research tree, space becomes much more of an issue than it would seem from the theoretical maximum.
It also seems Gaijin have noticed these issues, as seen with the recently leaked restructuring of the British ground research tree. But I won’t go into this too much for now, since it will be much better to do that once official news are released.