Religious Schools are set up such that you cannot make it as quite as comprehensive as Private or Public systems, which limits the extent of Education Access it can provide but still provides parity at lower levels of Bureaucracy expenditure.
This is a balancing question so it's a bit hard to answer definitively at this point in development, but I can elaborate on intent: if there's a significant discrepancy between two armies' military capabilities, this discrepancy can be made up by superiority in numbers in some cases but it's highly situational, depending on the Generals involved, terrain fought in, focus on offense vs defense, and so on. The biggest factor that would benefit the French in this situation is dynamic battle sizing and combat width mechanics, which makes it much less likely the French would be outnumbered and assaulted 20:1 in any given battle, making it possible for a small detachment to stand their ground or even conquer territory.
I would not say snail's pace, tech spread is often a considerable factor. Even a technologically advanced country will probably acquire around 60%+ or so of their techs at least in part due to spread from someone else who got there first.
There is a "Normal Wage" recomputed for your country every week that's based on the average wage rate across your private sector in Incorporated States. This Normal Wage is used as the basis for government and military wages, though you can lower or raise it around that baseline if you wish. University workers get paid a "Government Wage", so the same as Pops who work in e.g. Government Administrations and Art Academies.
Not unless it's very obviously associated with some prior historical event, no (and I'm not aware of anything like that in the current build of the game). We try to avoid arbitrary country-specific modifiers unless they're obviously linked to something "real", like geographical features, a Law on the books, etcetera.
We've actually been toying with the idea of being able to tag specific techs for suppression, the main challenge is making it something with comparable benefit to the other ways you can spend Authority rather than just a gimmicky thing you can do but won't in practice. We'll certainly explore this for the future!
The Literacy-based hard cap to active-innovation-spend-per-week is absolutely intentional, since no matter how many universities you have you can't research Dynamite in a week.
On the other hand any overflow goes towards your tech spread, to ensure excess Unis do something for you at all times.
Bit of a complicated answer to this one. The general answer is that techs that unlocks new goods must be known to the user as well as the producer, so a country cannot make use of imported tanks if they don't also know how to make them. On the other hand, different tiers of infantry units just need more Small Arms, Ammunition, etc (based on the idea that quantity equals quality for many goods), so the ability to produce new firearms (increasing your output of Small Arms) is decoupled from your ability to use those firearms (which tends to be framed as an organizational of doctrinal shift rather than one specifically based on armaments). At this point we do not include any kind of tech boosts from running trade routes, maybe in the future!
Yeah, the way we've modeled this is that certain states have the necessary preconditions for establishing Silk Plantations, but without the Sericulture tech they don't produce as well. So there's still a benefit to trading silk with China, though certain European countries are able to produce a certain amount themselves for domestic use if they have the manufacturing demand for it.
No, the prerequisites for getting tech spread is:
It might be a little faster than that, but the intent is that only the powerful Major and Great Powers will be able to fully complete tech trees by game end and will need to make hard decisions about which Era V techs to focus on when during the tail end of their campaign. A great many countries will acquire less - maybe not less than 50% due to the effects of tech spread in the latter half of the game, but perhaps around 60-70%, yes.
Steelworking and Atmospheric Engine by 1900, almost certainly, yes. We're thinking of ways to model tech spread in very isolated (or Isolationist) countries with virtually zero contact with the outside world, but at the moment we make the assumption that all centralized countries have some sort of contact with the outside world and is exposed to all kinds of ideas. Whether they would like to or can afford to implement them is another matter.
No
We will however look into player-named buildings (and other entities) post-release, we love the idea and want it in the game but it comes with some unexpected complexity we don't want to risk at the moment.
Three, one per tree. Less if there's nothing you qualify for in a certain tree.
Great question! We actually experimented with a lot of crazy ideas for quite some time, both on paper and in prototypes. All of the things we modeled were cool in their own way, but often got in the way of player expectations, were confusing, exploitable, or impossible to balance. Most of all, early feedback kept returning to the same thing: where is the tech tree? After digging further we came to the conclusion that the key thing most people were after in the tech system for this game was the ability to plan ahead and strategize, and a lot of our clever ideas got in the way of that. As a supporting system for pacing and player strategizing, we came to the conclusion that technology in V3 needed to be intuitive and comprehensible first and foremost, not a minigame or something that drastically deviated from player expectations.
Not at the moment, for usability reasons (representing prerequisites from off-tree could start to get really confusing) and in testing we've found that the Era-based incentives to research things vaguely "in order" tends to smooth out most logical inconsistencies. Having said that this is something on my roadmap to revisit in the future, as I think prereqs other than other techs (e.g. Laws) could also be a cool curveball to throw in some cases, so maybe we will figure out a way to represent this later down the line.
Yes you can change your mind, no you don't lose progress made.
It's insanely expensive and has a lot of diminishing returns built into it. If you don't reinvest a sizeable amount of your money into your economy you will eventually fall behind no matter how ahead you are in tech.
The way it works is that some Society techs unlock Laws along with Ideologies that favor those Laws, so at the same time as you're able to enact the Law you're also likely to get more people demanding that you do. In some cases you are technically always able to enact a Law except it has no support until the supporting Ideology comes along to demand it.
Effectively yes, because there are technologies that decrease your mortality, which increases net growth.
Yes, the base Wealth value (including increased consumption of Services, etc) is meant to represent this as well. The ability to effectively homeschool your children is not available to those living and working in poverty.
