The Unlock Ladder
What tech actually buys you, what it costs to hold, and exactly which unit unlocks at which tech level.
Tech's real role
Technology is a mid-game lever, not a founding one. It doesn't grow your population capacity at all — that's housing's job (see Population). What it does do: scale up how much every food/water production building actually yields (the same Kelp Farm produces more once you've researched further), factor into combat and defense math, and gate access to every advanced military unit. Pouring your founding cash into tech instead of housing and provisioning is exactly the ahead-of-your-people spending that sinks a new flotilla.
The purchase curve
Each additional point of technology costs more than the last — a smooth linear rise for the early game, then a hard step up every full 1,000 points owned. It starts genuinely cheap and gets steep fast; treat an early tech purchase very differently from a late one.
Progressive upkeep
Holding technology costs a real daily bill, and like an income-tax bracket it's progressive and cumulative — each point pays the rate for the band it falls in, not one blended rate applied to your whole stock:
| Tech range | Rate |
|---|---|
| 1–50 | Free — every flotilla holds starter tech at zero upkeep |
| 51–150 | $30/point/tide |
| 151–500 | $90/point/tide |
| 501–600 | $250/point/tide — the run-up to the nuclear-torpedo unlock |
| 601–1,500 | $600/point/tide — nukes and beyond |
| 1,501–3,000 | $900/point/tide |
| 3,000+ | $1,400/point/tide — uncapped |
A flotilla holding 1,500 technology pays roughly $599,500/tide in tech upkeep alone — real money that has to clear before anything else. The Technology KPI's detail popup on your Dashboard shows exactly what your next point would cost you per tide, so you never have to do this math by hand.
Unit gates
Every advanced military unit unlocks at a specific technology threshold. Drone swarm strike modes unlock separately from — and later than — the drone swarm unit itself.
| Unit | Tech required |
|---|---|
| Marines | 0 (always available) |
| Landing Craft | 25 |
| Assault Craft | 50 |
| Patrol Boats | 75 |
| Drone Swarms | 100 |
| Helicopters | 150 |
| War Corvettes | 200 |
| Submarines | 350 |
| Nuclear Torpedoes | 600 |
| Drone swarm mode | Tech required |
|---|---|
| Surveillance | 100 (same as the unit itself) |
| Infrastructure targeting | 300 |
| Armor targeting | 375 |
| Marine targeting | 450 |
| General targeting | 525 |
| Civilian targeting | 650 |
The matchmaking taper — and provisioning scale
Technology credits your matchmaking strength at a full rate only up to a knee at 1,500. Beyond that point, each additional point counts for far less toward the strength figure that determines your war band. A tech-rush strategy that ignores this taper past 1,500 is paying full upkeep price for dead matchmaking weight, not real combat power.
On the upside, technology also scales your provisioning buildings' output continuously, with no knee: at tech 1,000 your kelp farms and freshwater towers yield roughly 15% more than their base rate; at tech 6,500, roughly 98% more. That climb never stops paying off, even after the strength taper kicks in — it's just no longer buying you a bigger war band along with it.