Faction upgrades optimised??

I dont know how or what, but suddenly there was spare respect and the faction upgrades we were planning to unlock were cheaper..

What is this witchcraft and how did I do it?

In the top right corner and the faction tree is a little circle and you can optimise the order that you have the trees unlocked in as the first tree costs less respect than the second.

Clearly you've reached the tipping point where it's more beneficial for what was your secondary specialist perk to become your primary.

I was bashing upgrades in the travel branch to unlock 3rd branch, so if I had more upgrades in steadfast it would flip to top instead?

It depends how much you have in each, every branch uses double their base res, so it's going to be more optimal to have the highest base res in slot 1 (no multiplier), second highest base in slot 2 (only X2), next in slot 3 (X4) etcetc. It's really just a QoL thing so you don't have to swap them around after simming new uogrades :) always a good idea to know the tipping point anyways so you're prepped.

On a side note, you should have maxed tol before dipping into either ex or stead, you're costing yourself and your fac assholes billions in rehab long -term by axcemeleratinfg their rehab decay - you actually save more by reducing addictions per Xan than you do with the equivalent amount of res into +travel items, though ofc it's less flashy given that AP accumulation is hidden lol, when I ran my smol boi I liked to keep a chart and a brief (simple) explanation of how it worked so I could explain my work choices to noobs when asked :) would recommend