Better Mechanics : Technology Spread

This mod adds a global technology sharing group for extra immersion, realism, and historical accuracy.

Description

The idea behind it is that certain technologies become more and more common around the globe, similar to how the Neighbour Bonus in EU4 works. This, of course, helps minors way more than major nations. Especially things such as planes; just because you couldn't invest time into researching close air support planes does not mean that CAS is some magical alien technology in 1944 that needs to be researched from scratch — your scientists should have probably developed a general understanding of how CAS planes work by 1944 simply by reading the news of WW2.

Each nation that has researched a technology grants a +2% research speed bonus, up to a maximum of -100% if 50 other nations have also done so.

There is one unintended side effect: you can see exactly which other nations have researched a certain technology. I personally would prefer if there were a way to hide this. This side effect can be seen as positive or negative.

The downside is that you have perfect knowledge of every technology every other nation has researched, so everyone can see that you have, e.g., the Panthers, even before a single one is engaged in combat. The upside is that you know exactly where you stand technologically compared to other countries — which can be explained by your intelligence service doing its job.

Realism

To be honest, this mod is not strictly realistic — but it produces realistic outcomes. The mechanism is an abstraction: no, Bolivia did not instantly understand German tank doctrine the moment Guderian published it. But the general principles of modern warfare — CAS, combined arms, radar, jet propulsion — were broadly observed, studied, and replicated throughout WW2 at a pace that vanilla HOI4 simply does not model.

What is realistic is the end result: minors not being completely technologically stranded by 1944. Finland, Romania, and Hungary all operated fairly modern equipment late in the war despite limited R&D capacity — largely by observing, copying, and receiving equipment from allies and enemies alike. Major nations get zero benefit from this mod since they are always the first to research things, which is also correct — Germany did not need the world to research panzers to understand panzers.

Think of it less as literal technology transfer and more as the general acceleration of military knowledge during wartime. The EU4 neighbour bonus comparison already in this description is the right framing — nobody thinks EU4 provinces literally hand each other tech manuals, but the outcome models diffusion correctly.

Requirements

Requires Together For Victory.

Compatibility

While technically compatible with everything, this mod does affect num_tech_sharing_groups, which in vanilla is only used by the tech share continuous focus. Other mods might also use that check, though I can't think of any. This mod also makes that continuous focus slightly redundant — not that anyone ever used it anyway.

I'm centralizing everything for my mod collection on a new Discord server. I'll not respond to comments, bug reports, or suggestions here. Please use the Discord Server for all future requests. Comments have been disabled for efficiency and compliance.