Interactive Tech Tree Planner

Three opening research orders dominate the current meta. The military rush prioritizes Bronze Smelting → Short Sword → Conscription Reform, aiming to field upgraded infantry before turn 40. The agricultural economy build takes Irrigation → Crop Rotation → Fertilizer Application, banking on a 60% food surplus by mid-game to fund rapid population growth. The legalist governance path goes Codified Law → Census → Labor Allocation, which compounds administrative efficiency and unlocks the highest-tier nobility upgrades.

The planner above highlights the shortest prerequisite chain from your current research to any target node, and totals the research points (RP), knife money, and required retainers along that path. Use it before committing to a new era to avoid dead-end branches.

Retainers from the eight schools (法/儒/墨/道/兵/纵横/农/医) provide research acceleration when their school aligns with the tech domain. Mohist retainers grant 15–30% RP reduction on engineering and construction techs; Confucian retainers do the same for civil and administrative research; Legalist retainers accelerate governance and military-discipline techs. The planner factors in any assigned retainer when computing the effective RP cost.

A common efficiency trap is researching techs outside your retainer's domain — full-cost research is 40–60% slower than aligned research. If your retainer pool is thin, shape your research order around what you can accelerate rather than what looks optimal on paper.

Tech nodes are gated behind eras (Early Spring & Autumn → Late Spring & Autumn → Warring States Rise → Seven Hegemons). Cross-era nodes require a minimum era progression achieved through key-tech completion, not just accumulated RP. The planner's dependency check recursively verifies all prerequisites before recommending a path, so you won't waste RP on a node whose parent chain is incomplete.