Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary for Man the Guns. Today, we will talk about some changes we have made to the tech and research system.The biggest of which is, of course, the new tech tree for ships and other naval equipment. It is quite extensive, adding over 50 new technologies. Smaller changes and additions have been made to the armor and infantry tech trees through the addition of amphibious armor and to electro-mechanical engineering through the addition of Fire Control Systems.Many of these techs do unlock new modules, but some do not - ammunition techs, fire control methods and damage control training amongst other don’t, and instead provide passive bonuses. This makes them quite valuable as you don’t have to build or refit a ship to make use of them.The industry tree has also been expanded to accommodate fuel refining and storage. As one would expect, the new technologies improve the ratio of oil converted to fuel, giving you more fuel for the same amount of oil. The oil branch of the synthetic refinery tree no longer increases the oil output of each refinery but instead increases the amount of fuel generated by each synthetic refinery (synthetic refineries are not required to generate fuel if you have natural oil production!).Since this adds quite a bit of research to an already pretty full research tree, we have taken some steps to offset this increase.The first is that we have made a 15% increase to research speed across the board. The second is that a lot of the research in the new naval tech tree (as well as all the doctrine research) benefits from the research with XP system that gives you a fairly significant research boost if you have enough XP of that type to spare. For things like fire control methods and damage control training, researching without XP is significantly more time consuming to represent the lower effort spent during peacetime rather than learning from, well, experience.Lastly, we made some changes to how research bonuses are granted and how ahead of time bonuses are handled. Regular research bonuses are no longer reducing research cost but instead boosting research speed. A previous 50% reduction in cost is now a 100% boost in speed. Ahead of time bonuses have been changed to apply a flat reduction in years rather than a reduction to the penalty, so a 1944 tech with two years of reduction would be treated as a 1942 tech for the purpose of calculating research time.That is all for today. Next week, we will take a look at some of the art and music coming in Man the Guns.