Can a Tech have multiple prerequisites?

I'm thinking of creating a mod to make the tech tree narrower. Coming from Civ4 to this game, I find it annoying that someone can have Laser 5 without a Universal Translator, so if I spend time doing productive (non-weapon) research, someone else can completely smash my ships having done no productive research, only weapon research.

I wanted to make a mod where (for instance), Laser 5 is dependent on knowing Laser 4 PLUS Xeno Industrialism or something like that, but all the tech mod examples always list only one prerequisite (and nothing in the game seems to require multiple prerequisites, outside of the xeno ethics stuff).

Can this be done?

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No, the game is not designed to handle multiple prereqs.

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You can't do multiple prereqs, but you can adjust them to make the weapons come after another line of research.

All you would need to do is change the Galactic Warfare 'Requires' tag from 'None', to whatever tech you want the weapons tree to come after.

It might actually be interesting to make, say, Xeno Ethics the prereq for Galactic Warfare. That way they would have to get Diplomatic Translators and Xeno Ethics before any weapons research could begin. They would be forced into choosing an alignment very early in the game.

Or they could be forced into researching the Research branch to a certain point, to ultimately make researching those weapons all the faster while forestalling the earliest wars.

I never thought of doing it that way, so thanks for the idea. It brings a new twist to the game.

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Quoting kryo,

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No, the game is not designed to handle multiple prereqs.

The game isn't designed with it in mind, and so the tech tree itself doesn't display it, although each prerequisite tech does show that it unlocks the tech or design in question. I'm just not sure from memory if it tells you what else you need.

But it does work, and it doesn't crash the game or introduce other errors (that I've noticed). All you need to do is define multiple prerequisite entries, as you would the initial one.

Do note my experiences are largely from DA and TA; I don't remember testing it in DL.

It's one thing to say something is unsupported-it's another thing entirely to say it's not possible.

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But it does work, and it doesn't crash the game or introduce other errors (that I've noticed). All you need to do is define multiple prerequisite entries, as you would the initial one.

Last I'd seen, setting multiple prereqs wound up not only in the tech tree rendering incorrectly, but the tech would unlock after only getting one prereq, or similar incorrect behavior. As I said, it's not designed for it.

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In my experience, the techs do work pretty well, they just look really ugly.

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Kryo is correct. They do not work at all. Multiple prerequisites cause tree rendering issues and the tech is unlocked after one prereq is researched. Believe me, I tested this out while working on TBL.

-Dave

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