Great mod! Would you mind explaining why it has to set the evolution factor every 60 * X ticks as opposed to just updating it whenever a new tech finishes researching?

Hi!
well the reason is that the evolution in the game is growing based on e.g. time and pollution. so if you have some long tech to research, or you just stop research for a while, evolution would continue to grow. or if you have a 24/7 running server that doesn't pause if no one is online you would also find that over night your evolution caps even if you didn't do any research.

Ah gotcha, I do have a 24/7 server, but I always manually set the time and pollution factors to 0, so it wouldn't matter to me. Your mod is an excellent way for me to keep evolution relevant with those settings, so thank you very much!

Using the on tick event should be forbidden for performance reasons ^^ I would recommend to integrate it into the on_research_finished event, since people who use your mod play a map with no evolution progress.

I have now created a similar mod but I only update the evolution when a new tech has been researched, see https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ResearchLevelSetsEvolution

yeah performance was the reason why i do the calculation in on_research_finished and only apply the value in on_tick, so it is lightweight. back then i think the on_nth_tick function did not exist yet otherwise i would have used that.
still i think if you only apply it during on_research_finished, the mod won't function correctly unless the player during map creation sets all evolution factors to 0 manually. i wanted a install and forget kind of solution that does not rely on assumptions, so i went for this design.
but i'm happy you could customize the code to your liking - your version is definitely a better fit for players with lots of optional technologies, and the excluding military can make sense from a gameplay perspective.